The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain

228 Pages·2007·1.05 MB·English

by  Arun Kundnani

The End of Tolerance
Racism in 21st-Century Britain
ARUN KUNDNANI
P
Pluto Press
LONDON (cid:127) ANN ARBOR, MI
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First published 2007 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Arun Kundnani 2007
The right of Arun Kundnani to be identifi ed as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback
ISBN-13 978 0 7453 2646 7
ISBN-10 0 7453 2646 3
Paperback
ISBN-13 978 0 7453 2645 0
ISBN-10 0 7453 2645 5
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Foreword by A. Sivanandan vii
Introduction 1
1 Echoes of Empire 10
2 From Dependency to Displacement 26
3 Seeds of Segregation 40
4 We Are Here Because You Are There 55
5 Asylum and the Welfare State 72
6 The Dialectics of Terror 90
7 The Halabja Generation 106
8 Integrationism: The Politics of Anti-Muslim Racism 121
9 Migration and the Market-state 141
10 Here to Stay 153
11 The New Leviathan 165
12 Community: Theirs and Ours 180
Notes to the Text 189
Index 215
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Acknowledgements
This book would have been unimaginable without the unique political
and intellectual environment that has been carved out and sustained
at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR). Over the last decade, I have
been fortunate enough to benefi t from this ‘surrogate university’ and
the political vision of its founder, A. Sivanandan. Most of the ideas
for the book began life in articles written for the IRR’s publications
Race & Class and IRR News, and my colleagues there – including
Harmit Athwal, Jenny Bourne, Liz Fekete, Hazel Waters and Rosie
Wild – have contributed in immeasurable ways to every page of this
book; I owe them a further debt of gratitude for allowing me time
off to fi nish it.
A large number of other people have helped me to develop the
ideas in the book, through discussions, talks or through reading
sections of the text. Particular thanks are owed to Lee Bridges, David
Edgar, Suresh Grover, Arzu Merali, Herman Ouseley, Colin Prescod,
Jeremy Seabrook, Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, Frances Webber and Salma
Yaqoob. Others who have contributed in important ways include
Monica Hingorani, Dashty Jamal, Naina Patel and Deeder Zaman.
The assistance I received while undertaking research in Bradford,
Hull and Oldham is greatly appreciated. Those who accommodated
me, sometimes literally, in those places are the real authors of this
book. I would also like to thank all those involved in the Civil Rights
Caravan of 2000, which provided the initial impetus for this project,
and my editor at Pluto Press, David Castle.
My greatest debt is to Tanuka, without whose support, expertise,
intellect and love this book would never have been written.
I would like to dedicate this book to my parents, whose sacrifi ces
made it possible.
vi
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Foreword
A. Sivanandan
Racism is not an isolate. It is imbricated in the socio-economic
structure and political culture of a society. And if it once functioned as
a rationale for slavery, it today serves as a justifi cation for imperialism.
But the imperialism of industrial capital differs from the imperialism
of information capital. Hence any analysis of twenty-fi rst-century
racism needs to be situated within the parameters of globalism
and globalisation. Globalism, the latest stage of imperialism, holds
western civilisation and values as superior to all others, and insists
on visiting them on the rest of the world, by force if necessary.
Globalisation, the process that underpins and advances that project,
engenders a monolithic economic system which immiserates and
displaces Third World populations and throws them up on the shores
of Europe.
Against this background, the war on terror, following on from
September 11th and July 7th, has created a populist anti-Muslim,
anti-asylum culture, based on the politics of fear – which in turn
has led to the erosion of civil liberties and the ushering in of a new
state racism. And it is state racism, as Arun Kundnani argues, which
through its laws, administrative edicts and judicial decisions fosters
institutional racism and shapes popular racism.
But nowhere has such analyses been forthcoming: the academics,
caught up in yesterday’s mantras, are unable or loath to speak truth
to power; the think-tanks speak to the New Labour agenda and the
activist Left is still idealistically looking for a borderless world.
The End of Tolerance not only shows how the global fall-out has
determined Britain’s migration and asylum policy but how, more
immediately, the war on terror, in demonising multiculturalism, seeks
to put an end to Britain’s proud record of integration and ally it
instead to Europe’s assimilationist policies in a descent into nativism.
On another level, The End of Tolerance relates global forces and
intellectual currents to personal experiences (by way of interviews)
and their impact on families and communities. On all these levels
– of analysis and narrative, of the empirical and the theoretical, the
personal and the political – Kundnani follows in the grand tradition
vii
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viii Foreword
of the Institute of Race Relations’ corpus of work that began with the
pioneering study ‘Race, Class and the State’ in 1976. All future works
on racism will have to begin where Kundnani has left off.
A. Sivanandan
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Introduction
It is the moment of the boomerang … it comes back on us, it strikes us, and we do
not realize any more than we did the other times that it’s we who have launched
it. – Jean-Paul Sartre1
Offi cials at the United Nations speak of ‘problems without passports’.
European thinktanks write of ‘identity and security’ issues. Media
commentators warn of the ‘dark side of globalisation’. Under all these
headings, what is being referred to is a cluster of issues to do with
immigration, integration and terrorism that have, since the end of
the Cold War, come to dominate the political landscape of the West,
from Europe to the US to Australia. In all these countries, political
leaders, policymakers and pundits ask themselves how ‘abusive’
asylum seekers and migrants can best be deterred; how minorities,
particularly Muslims, whom they regard as being at odds with Western
societies, can be integrated; and how Islamic terrorism, ‘extremism’
and ‘radicalisation’ can be prevented. These issues – commonly
grouped together, albeit with differing emphases in different national
contexts – are the new spectres haunting the West. The argument of
this book is that what has united these various issues and brought
them to the fore at the present time is their being symptoms of a
deeper shift in global political geography: the fact that the great
wells of human despair, rooted in poverty and powerlessness, can
no longer be contained within national boundaries. The failure of
Western societies to come to terms with this fact, and recognise in it
an unintended consequence of the very brand of ‘globalisation’ that
their governments have promoted is what lies behind the anxiety
and fear that surrounds those the West defi nes as ‘aliens’, whether
migrants, asylum seekers or ‘Muslim extremists’. It is the moment
of the boomerang.
The world can no longer be imagined, as it was half a century
ago, divided into neatly separated nations, each a separate ship
on the sea of humanity. According to the old model of national
sovereignty, a state claimed responsibility for its own national ship
but had no obligations to assist those on other vessels; nor were
states generally entitled to intervene across the clear blue water that
separated one nation from another. National sovereignty placed a
1
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2 The End of Tolerance
wall of mutual non-obligation between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Following the
formal independence of the Third World from colonial rule, the poor
and powerless of Africa and Asia looked to their own states to uplift
them and rarely took their anger across national boundaries. But
since the end of the Cold War, under the auspices of ‘globalisation’
and the ‘war on terror’, multinational corporations have assumed
unfettered power over most of the world’s national economies and
Western governments have arrogated to themselves the right to
openly intervene anywhere in the world. Globalisation spells the
end of national sovereignty and, in its present guise, gives rise to
a ‘global’ sovereignty in the hands of a few. But the more that the
world becomes interconnected, the more glaring the contradiction
that only certain interests have a say in its direction. The upshot is an
inevitable resistance to the structures of power that are concentrated
in the hands of Western states and corporations. Although that
resistance takes many forms, ultimately it implies a demand for
global citizenship.
Nowhere are these contradictions greater than in the Middle East,
where millions are held in poverty by authoritarian regimes, which
owe their continued existence to a willingness to acquiesce in the
demands of US foreign policy. As 9/11 demonstrated, anger at such
regimes no longer stops at national borders but reaches all the way
to New York and Washington. Yet, in trying to make sense of global
terrorism, Western governments do not comprehend their own role
in creating a world of fundamental inequality and injustice; instead
they must systematically deny that terrorism is a symptom of these
facts. Terrorism is cast simply as an expression of a fanatical Islamic
value system that is culturally at odds with the West. The idea of
a cultural rather than a political antagonism, rooted in a ‘clash of
civilisations’, as Samuel Huntington famously labelled it, provides a
convenient explanation for why the end of the Cold War did not lead
to Francis Fukuyama’s much-vaunted ‘end of history’.2 A new global
drama is invoked in which the West and ‘Islamic extremism’ are the
only two characters and the only story-line is the inevitability of a
violent confl ict between two distinct value systems. On the one side
is ‘Islamic extremism’ and its supposed envy and hatred of Western
wealth and freedom. On the other side, the ‘liberating forces’ of the
United States, Britain and their allies. There is no middle ground
or overlap between the two. ‘Terrorism’ originates from the Islamic
world with the West and its history contributing nothing to this
process. The converse is true of freedom and democracy. Obviously,
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Introduction 3
the full complexity of different societies and their relationships are
trampled in the staging of this ideology. As Edward Said wrote in
the 1990s:
[M]uch of what one reads and sees in the media about Islam represents the
aggression as coming from Islam because that is what ‘Islam’ is. Local and
concrete circumstances are thus obliterated. In other words, covering Islam
is a one-sided activity that obscures what ‘we’ [Westerners] do, and highlights
instead what Muslims and Arabs by their very fl awed nature are.3
A similar approach is followed in trying to make sense of forced
migration. The epic social upheavals associated with ‘globalisation’
have led to millions of people in Africa, Asia and the Middle East being
forced to leave their homes as their existing livelihoods collapsed
around them, or as a result of the warfare, ethnic confl ict and political
repression that were symptoms of a state’s inability to manage a
nation’s ‘integration’ into the global market. These migrations have
been exacerbated by the state terrorism, regime change and sponsored
warfare that have been orchestrated, fi rst in the name of the Cold
War and, later, in the ‘war on terror’. The 1951 Geneva Convention
on Refugees had already implied the existence of a ‘global’ right of
foreign nationals to claim asylum in any signatory state in order to
escape persecution. By the 1980s, asylum seekers from Africa and
Asia were beginning to exercise this right in Europe, and the struggle
for personal security no longer restricted itself to the boundaries of
one’s own nation-state or refugee camps in neighbouring countries.
Yet, when these migrants and asylum seekers wash up on the shores
of Europe, they are demonised as a threat to the global economic
hierarchy that divides ‘our’ wealth from ‘their’ poverty. In place of
an understanding of what causes forced migration comes a farrago
of aggressively promoted stereotypes that merely refl ect the West’s
own anxieties. The media-manufactured stories of ‘bogus asylum
seekers’, the comic-book stereotypes of foreign scroungers, ‘illegals’
and terrorists, and the fear that the West is being overrun by the
‘Third World’, therefore go hand in hand with a deadly silence on
the West’s actual role in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and the
ongoing devastation which that role infl icts. Indeed, the persistence
of these stereotypes depends on hiding from view the reality of what
asylum seekers are fl eeing from. The system looks everywhere for
explanations except within its own tangled and complex respon-
sibilities. Of necessity, it turns to the demonisation of the ‘alien’
peoples whose shadows it fears. Poverty, violence and dependency are
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