Going Backwards: Europe’s Racial Crisis

Going Backwards: Europe’s Racial Crisis

 

• Author: Ian Law, 13 June 2009

Ethnic conflict in Central Africa, anti-Roma racism in Europe and oppression of indigenous peoples and other minorities across many regions, together with rising levels of conflict, violence and indiscriminate killing do not indicate that we are moving towards a post-ethnic, post-racial world. The racist riots against Roma in Spain and Italy and the criminalisation of Roma from Romania in Italy and Finland in are indicative of the gravity of the current anti-Gypsyism movement in Europe. The racialisation of regions, nations and sub-national/local contexts is pervasive but this is often denied or underplayed. Racial and ethnic divisions are highly significant but they are also flexible and fragmenting. The idea of race itself is increasingly criticised yet it persists in genetics and genomics. UN peacekeeping, the use of international and national law to challenge racial discrimination and levels of knowledge and understanding of racism, ethnicity and migration have all increased. Global racially based social structures undeniably exist and persist but their legitimacy is increasingly questioned.  Following Winant’s (2006:999) prediction of a ‘global racial crisis’, this idea maps well onto the current contours of European developments. Better theory and greater understanding of racism and ethnicity on the one hand, parallel deepening ‘structural’ racism and racial and ethnic exclusions on the other.

In the context of insecure national states and global inequalities, population mobility and international migration will lead to greater cultural diversification of national populations. New technologies and changing patterns of consumption are driving the construction of larger regional and global cultures. These globalising, cosmopolitan forces are also stimulating new forms of ethnic defensiveness and hostility to migrants, e.g. in the USA, and towards long established minorities as evident in the development of antisemitic movements and in anti-minority hate speech in Russia. The strength of racial and ethnic loyalties and their practical adequacy for many people in making sense of their position in the world, in pre-modern, modern and contemporary times indicates the likelihood that such conflict will continue, despite international declarations and interventions, creative national policies and inter-ethnic mixing.

The everyday persistence of diverse racisms and exclusions which shape the life of a complex range of migrant and minority groups across Europe is clear. The European Union Fundamental Rights Agency has been documenting many of these trends highlighting ambivalent governance which both exacerbates and reproduces many of these surface/overt and structural racialisation processes, at the same time as producing an increasingly bewildering array of unevenly developed strategic and practice responses which frequently fail. This is particularly evident in responses to racist violence. There is a ‘crisis’ in strategies to tackle racist violence where legislation, techniques and approaches increasingly proliferate but fail to impact on resurgent patterns of attack and murder. National reports, which are all available on the FRA website (http://fra.europa.eu/fra/index.php) , are full of examples of poor legislation, poor criminal justice practice and poor data collection, alongside limited evidence of practical actions and commitments by some governments and agencies to tackle racist violence.

Franco Frattini, the EU justice commissioner recently confirmed that five EU member states have major problems with endemic extreme right extremism and associated racist violence including Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and Denmark. These comments were made after a gang of fifty drunken youths shouting racist slogans attacked eight Indians in the east German town of Muegeln in Saxony and two African men were beaten by right wing extremists in Mainz in western Germany, together with concerns over the role played by the NPD in inciting these incidents. [The NPD (National Democractic Party) is a nationalist anti-immigrant group, directly associated with neo-nazi and skinhead groups and which openly incites race hate on its website.] Amil, a leading anti-Nazi group in the Saxony region confirmed that there had been 137 neo-Nazi attacks on individuals in the first six months of 2007, and the Forsca research group confirmed that currently half of east German youth, aged 14 to 25, believed that neo-Nazism had many good points. There has been much debate over the banning of the NPD and this has been a legal fiasco ending in failure. This illustrates that Germany’s response to such political racism and violence is in crisis, as it has been for many years, with confusion over what should be done, how it should be done and what works in tackling politically organised racial hatred. In the UK, there has also been increasing concern over the rising electoral support for political racism.

Resurgent ideologically driven race hate is being documented in many European countries. Public political culture in the Netherlands has become more hostile and aggressive, and this, combined with a focus on Islamic extremism rather than right wing extremism has allowed organised race hate groups to flourish. The Anne Frank Foundation documented a doubling of extreme right acts of racist violence from 2006 to 2007, and identifying a small core of 100 ideologically driven men in groups like Blood and Honour and Combat 18. Formation of antisemitic, anti-Roma and homophobic paramilitary groups in public continues. In Hungary, Jobbik a far right party and over 1,000 of its supporters inducted the founding members of its new paramilitary wing the Magya Guard in public outside the Presidential Palace in Budapest in August 2007. In the Czech Republic, the extreme right National Corporativism movement which mobilises amonst many skinheads organised a demonstration in Svitavy in July 2007 to support the cause of a 23 year old skinhead who was convicted of killing a Roman man.

For many European states racism is all about the activities of the extreme right, masking the causes of institutionalised racial violence and exclusion through the fictitious construction of panic-inducing postcolonial figures of vilification. So, for example racialised policing, stop and search methods, are justified through panic about Black criminals or Muslim terrorists. Racism is seen as operating only on the extreme fringes of society, not within mainstream European state institutions, with key forms of institutional racism, for example in policing, being ignored. The paradox here is that many of these global, international and national institutions are also increasingly developing a mass of creative, innovative and exciting interventions with the objective of reducing racism and racist violence in particular.

In the UK the weakness of Labour support in poorer areas and the weakness of Conservative support have shown themselves incapable of engaging with the changing fortunes and political dynamics of the BNP. Almost a million people voted for the extreme right and it is highly likely that this may triple to the levels of support seen in the Netherlands, Austria and Hungary over the next five years. Unlike 1979 the election of a Tory government is unlikely to lead to a total collapse in extreme right voting, political and economic conditions are different, and the BNP is a better organised than the National Front was thirty years ago. The danger of narrowing the debate on racism in the UK to that of the role and prospects of the extreme right is also equally clear. This is just one element in the wider unfolding of Europe’s racial crisis.