“Blood” and “Culture”
Ethnic Conflict and the Authoritarian Right

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Blood" and "Culture" have long provided people the world over with seemingly "commonsense" explanations for civil conflict. When confronted with the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia or Rwanda, it is often taken for granted that the cause must lie in fixed, implacable, ingrained and ancient antagonisms. How else can the sheer horror of neighbours hacking each other to pieces be explained -- neighbours who had previously lived together in apparent harmony? Hatred between Muslim and Serb or between Hutu and Tutsi must be "in the blood" -- let the two sides at each others' throats and genocide is inevitable.¹

Yet scratch below the surface of inter-ethnic civil conflict, and the shallowness and deceptiveness of "blood" or "culture" explanations are soon revealed.² "Tribal hatred" (though a real and genuine emotion for some) emerges as the product not of "nature" or of a primordial "culture", but of "a complex web of politics, economics, history, psychology and a struggle for identity".³ As Fergal Keane, a BBC Africa correspondent, writes of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994:

"Like many of my colleagues, I drove into [Rwanda] believing the short stocky ones had simply decided to turn on the tall thin ones because that was the way it has always been. Yet now, two years later ... I think the answer is very different. What happened in Rwanda was the result of cynical manipulation by powerful political and military leaders. Faced with the choice of sharing some of their wealth and power with the [insurgent] Rwandan Patriotic Front, they chose to vilify that organisation's main support group, the Tutsis ... The Tutsis were characterised as vermin. Inyenzi in kinyarwanda -- cockroaches who should be stamped on without mercy ... In much the same way as the Nazis exploited latent anti-Semitism in Germany, so did the forces of Hutu extremism identify and whip into murderous frenzy the historical sense of grievance against the Tutsis ... This was not about tribalism first and foremost but about preserving the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the elite."⁴

This is not to deny that ethnicity -- be it in Rwanda or anywhere else in the world -- is a very real social force, a force whose outcome can be as positive as it can be murderous. It is to insist, however, that the shared values, histories, customs and identities that generate "ethnicity" are socially constructed. At root, ethnic conflicts result not from blood hatred, but from socially, politically and economically-generated divisions.⁵

Ethnicity is grounded in social imagination. Moreover, the "imagined communities"⁶ which result, though defining particular groups as distinct and unique at any one given moment and in any one given context, are not unchanging.

On the contrary, they are constantly being reimagined, as relationships within and between groups are reworked through everyday social interaction. Who is "us" and who is "them" is forever being subtly redefined as histories are told and retold; traditions invented and denied; statuses ascribed and challenged; allegiances forged and broken; and identities claimed and rejected.⁷ "Culture" thus provides no better explanation for ethnic conflict than "blood". In fact, it is the form that a culture takes at any given moment in history which is what needs explaining.⁸

In many instances, that form is influenced decisively by the active manipulation of ethnicity by certain political and social actors, for whom "ethnic identity" provides a fertile political terrain on which to mobilise. In some cases, such mobilisation may be directed towards liberatory ends -- for example, the challenging of oppressive cultural hegemonies: in others, towards ends that are repressive, xenophobic, murderous even. In either case, conflict may be the outcome.

Recognising the ways in which ethnicity is used -- crucially, by whom, for what (un)stated political aims and from what position of power⁹ -- is thus a critical first step to understanding the roots of what are often portrayed as "blood" conflicts. It is also key to exposing -- and challenging -- those who would harness ethnicity to racist and authoritarian ends.

This briefing looks specifically at the mobilisation of ethnicity in support of authoritarian, discriminatory and racist political agendas. It does not claim that the same politics are present wherever and whenever ethnicity becomes a terrain for political organising: rather, that such politics are all too easily rendered invisible by facile explanations of "blood" and "culture".

Indeed, it is the shroud that such explanations throw over the discriminatory politics underlying many expressions of "ethnic identity" that makes ethnicity such an attractive mobilising tool for the racist groups of the Right. Unsurprisingly, the last decade has seen the authoritarian New Right in Europe consciously reframing its politics of exclusion in the beguilingly progressive language of "cultural difference" -- a language which permits racist to project racism as a socially-acceptable act of "loyalty to people of one's own kind" or as legitimate "cultural self-defence".¹⁰

Allied to a politics of cultural essentialism¹¹ and exclusion, the Right's defence of "cultural difference" becomes a politics of cultural apartheid.

It is a discourse, moreover, that is by no means restricted to the Right: amongst groupings that are generally viewed as progressive, there are those whose views on ethnicity chime in disturbing harmony with the views of the New Right. Within the Greens, for example, a preoccupation with "authentic cultures" and "ancient traditions" frequently lends itself to a politics of authoritarian cultural essentialism. Not surprisingly, the New Right has actively singled out leading "traditionalist" Greens as potential political allies.

Such alliances -- although often overtly focused on a shared opposition to globalisation -- inevitably lend support to the New Right's authoritarian agenda and raise critical questions about the politics of those involved. The need for progressive groups to distance themselves -- in action as well as in theory -- from the Right's "cultural" agenda is urgent.

Rwanda: Ethnicity and Repression

Rwanda provides an example both of the shifting nature of ethnicity and of the harnessing of ethnic identities by elite groups in the interests of political self-preservation. What it is to be "Hutu" or "Tutsi" not only reflects the experience of colonialism but also the practice of development in the post-colonial period: additionally, it varies widely across classes and from one part of the country to another.¹²

Little is known for certain how ethnicity was conceived of prior to the advent of colonial rule, first under the Germans and later under the Belgians. The longest-established ethnic group in the region are the Twa, a hunter-gatherer group which, today, is both small in numbers and discriminated against by the majority of Hutu and Tutsi alike.¹³ It is believed that the Hutu migrated into the region several centuries ago, certainly before the arrival of the cattle-rearing Tutsi during the 15th and 16th centuries. By the 19th century, according to some cultural historians:

"hundreds of years of cohabitation and intermarriage had produced an 'integrated' social system wherein the categories of Hutu and Tutsi were largely occupationally defined: whoever acquired a sizeable herd of cattle was called Tutsi and was considered highly."¹⁴

Whilst this is disputed by some, it appears likely that, by the time Rwanda was colonized by the Europeans in the 19th century, it was a kingdom with a Tutsi King, and the Hutu (or farmers, depending on one's perspective) were dominated by the Tutsis (or cattle-owners).

Whatever the nature of ethnicity in pre-colonial times, it is clear that the colonial powers made ethnic distinctions a fact of everyday life in Rwanda. Under colonial rule, ethnic identity cards were introduced, fixing identities -- regardless of social context -- on the basis of spurious racial science, such as skull size and nose measurements. New sources of power and privilege also emerged under colonial rule which accrued almost exclusively to the white rulers and those designated Tutsi. Jobs in the administration and the army, for example, were reserved almost exclusively for "Tutsi". The Germans, and later the Belgians, justified such exclusion on the grounds that the Tutsi were somehow less African, more European and, by extension, superior to their Hutu fellow countrymen and women. As Keane reports:

"They cited the tallness of the Tutsis, their aquiline facial features, the fact that they preferred to raise cattle than till the land as evidence of a superior civilization ... All manner of humiliating folly was employed in the name of proving this theory of innate Tutsi superiority. Skulls and noses were measured. Legends were invented to explain the presence of these superior beings in the centre of Africa ... All of this was done less because the Belgians had any real desire to embrace the Tutsis as their equals, but rather because they needed the Tutsis as their allies to maintain a fundamentally unjust political dispensation."¹⁵

In other words, "race and identity were used to create and preserve an inherently unjust power structure" -- a power structure with a clear hierarchy from whites to Tutsi to Hutu to Twa.¹⁶

After Independence

The bottled-up sense of injustice felt by those at the bottom of the hierarchy exploded in 1958 while Rwanda was in the process of gaining independence, not least because the departing Belgians abandoned their support for the Tutsi elite -- who were increasingly seen as dangerous anti-colonial leftists -- in favour of the Hutu.¹⁷ The result was a series of brutal massacres as the new Hutu ruling elite -- backed by Belgium -- whipped up popular resentment against the Tutsi in order to consolidate its hold on power. It was a tactic that was to underpin the policies of successive post-colonial governments as well.

Racism (the institutionalised discrimination by one group against another based on culturally- and/or biologically-ascribed differences) became embedded in government policy, just as it had been in the colonial period -- only now, the targets were the Tutsi, the Twa and any Hutu opponents of the regime. The system of ethnic identity cards, introduced by the Belgians, was maintained: Tutsis were restricted from entering the army or the civil service through a discriminatory quota system; military personnel were forbidden from marrying Tutsis, an interdiction that also applied to those seeking political appointments. Daily, through legislation and other administrative "proofs", people were "reminded" that Tutsis were not only "different" but potential "enemies within".¹⁸ A pool of scapegoats was thus created that could be targeted in times of unrest -- and targeted they were. In 1972-73, for example, when popular discontent with the regime's failure to address increasing levels of poverty threatened the government, mass anti-Tutsi campaigns were orchestrated by the leadership: thousands of Tutsi children were thrown out of school, whilst thousands of Tutsi adults lost their jobs.¹⁹

Despite such state-sponsored racism, millions of dollars of foreign aid flowed into the country throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Conditions for the majority of people (Hutu, Tutsi and Twa alike) deteriorated -- not least as a result of development projects that the government and aid agencies instituted.²⁰ By the early 1990s, according to social scientist Peter Uvin,²¹ almost 50 per cent of the population were living in abject poverty, while a further 40 per cent were only marginally above the poverty level. Meanwhile, the top one per cent of the population -- the small clique of Hutu who were the favoured supporters of the country's president, Juvenal Habyarimana -- lived in luxury.

By 1990, the pressure for political change had become intense. Internal dissent was on the increase as non-sectarian Hutus began to organize against the authoritarianism and widespread corruption of the Habyarimana regime. The government also faced a growing military threat from the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a guerrilla army consisting largely of Tutsi exiles, which was now strong enough to invade the country from its bases in neighbouring Uganda. With the Cold War over, the aid agencies, on which the regime increasingly relied, began to put pressure on the regime to democratise and embrace power-sharing with the RPF and the growing domestic opposition.

Threatened from within and without, Habyarimana and his northern Hutu clique seized on the one strategy likely to mobilise public support behind the government: scapegoating the Tutsis. As Keane reports:

"Newspapers and radio stations began to exhort the people to rally behind Hutuism. Drive the Tutsis out and show them no mercy, the virulent Radio Mille Collines demanded. A Hutu militia was established, the Interahamwe: 'those who stand together'. The people were being conditioned for a final solution that would rid Rwanda of all political opposition to the government -- all of the Tutsis and the non-sectarian Hutus who opposed the regime. The Tutsis were convenient scapegoats and the non-sectarian Hutus could easily be condemned as traitors to their tribe. When Habyarimana himself seemed to weaken under international pressure and consider power sharing, his jet was blown out of the sky. Much as the burning of Reichstag provided Hitler with a pretext for taking power, the murder of Habyarimana, very probably by his associates, gave the signal for the onset of Rwanda's final solution. On the evening of 6 April 1994, the killing began."²²

The result, as the world now knows, was a bloodbath -- a bloodbath rooted not in some innate "cultural" impulse of one ethnic group to butcher its neighbours, but in an attempt to defend one particular system of power and privilege. The initial violence in Kigali was not spontaneous: the killings on the night that Habyarimana was assassinated were carried out largely by the president's own guards, local militia and the army.²³ The vast majority of provincial governors, communal mayors and ordinary citizens did not join in the carnage for weeks -- weeks in which they were bombarded daily with messages of hatred against "Tutsis". Ethnicity became the tool through which a small but endangered elite spread fear throughout Rwandan society, legitimising the suppression of opponents in the process and, ultimately, desensitising people to violence.²⁴

The Politics of Ethnicity

Similar analyses hold for many other sites of conflict where primordial tribal hostilities are assumed to be the root cause of violence.²⁵ As the historian Noel Malcolm remarks of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s:

"In the West, the popular view of the recent wars ... was always that these were 'ethnic conflicts', created by the bubbling up of obscure but virulent ethnic hatreds among the local populations. This approach was essentially false: it ignored the primary role of politicians (above all, the Serbian nationalist-communist Milosevic) in creating conflict at the political level ... As a characterisation of the history of those regions, talk about 'ancient ethnic hatreds' was in any case grossly misleading: there had never been ethnic wars in the 'ancient' history of Bosnia or Croatia, and the only conflicts with a partly ethnic character were modern ones, produced under special geopolitical conditions (above all, the Second World War). Some elements of prejudice ... did of course exist. But between low-level prejudices on the one hand and military conflict, concentration camps and mass murder on the other, there lies a very long road: it was the political leaders who propelled the people down that road, and not vice versa."²⁶

Indeed, there are few "ethnic" (or even "religious") conflicts where closer analysis does not reveal supposedly ingrained "tribal" hostilities to be grounded not so much in deep and ancient rivalries (though these may well be played upon) but in contemporary conflicts over power, justice, values, resources and rights. This is not surprising because ethnicity -- the "conscious and imaginative construction and mobilisation of differences"²⁷ -- is always mediated and shaped by society, and its mobilisation as a political and cultural force by whatever social groups ineluctably reflects relationships of power.

The mobilisation of ethnicity by social movements, elites and nation states can take numerous forms, both negative and positive. It can be directed "towards self-expression, autonomy and efforts at cultural survival" or it can be principally negative in form, "characterized largely by hate, racism and the desire to dominate or eliminate other groups."²⁸

In some cases, ethnicity may be a rallying-point around which minority groups mobilise to resist (or redefine) cultural identities imposed upon them by the majority.²⁹ Examples include the revival of suppressed cultural traditions by groups such as the Basques or native American Indians (resisting, respectively, the imposition of mainstream Spanish and US/Canadian cultural values) or the efforts of the Nagas and Mizos in the North-East of India to resist political and cultural oppression.

In other cases, however, ethnicity may involve the mobilisation of the majority around imagined (or reimagined) national identities in an attempt to legitimise the suppression and colonisation of minority cultures.

In Indonesia, the government-sponsored transmigration of peasant families from Java to the outer islands of the archipelago during the 1980s was part of a wider programme aimed at "integrating all ethnic groups into one nation, the Indonesian nation."³⁰ Indigenous inhabitants in the outer islands were officially viewed as suku suku terasing ("backward and alien"): in order to assimilate them into the "Indonesian Nation", the authorities broke up whole communities, dispersing individual families into separate transmigration camps. According to the Minister of Transmigration in 1985, "different ethnic groups will in the long run disappear because of integration ... There will be one kind of man."³¹

Ethnicity has been similarly mobilised in Thailand to blame upland shifting cultivators for environmental degradation.³²

Within Britain, the ascription of pejorative ethnicities to the Scots and the Irish³³ was put to the same brutal ends by the English authorities and their elite allies to justify the clearances of the Highlands of Scotland in the 19th century -- when hundreds of thousands of "unproductive" crofters were forcibly removed from their lands³⁴ -- and the starvation of millions of Irish peasants during the potato famine of the 1840s.³⁵

The same scapegoating mobilisation of ethnicity is evident today within elite discourses, both North and South, that ascribe stereotyped tendencies ("unproductiveness", "backwardness", "fecklessness" and "laziness") to poorer ethnic groups, whose marginalisation is explained through their "culture of poverty".³⁶

From "Blood" to "Culture": A New Racism

Such imposed cultural stereotypes have never gone unchallenged: oppressed groups have demanded their right to self-determination and, critically, the right to define -- and redefine -- themselves rather than to be defined hegemonically by others.³⁷ Such demands, which have long formed a central plank of anti-racist, indigenous and human rights movements worldwide, have frequently been based not only on the recognition of the diversity of cultures, but also on a commitment to confronting the political and social basis of racism, discrimination, exclusion and xenophobia. As such, these demands have played a central role in the struggle "against the hegemony of certain standardising imperialisms and against the elimination of minority or dominated civilizations".³⁸

Stripped of that commitment to confront racism and other forms of discrimination, however, the "right to be different" may take on very different overtones. Within Europe, for example, the New Right has attempted to appropriate the language of "difference" in the cause of ethnic separation. In France, the Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE), a group comprising largely right-wing intellectuals, some of whom have close ties to neo-fascist groups throughout Europe,³⁹ has been at the forefront of developing what has been referred to as "differentialist racism". By portraying cultural identities as fixed fate⁴⁰ and -- depending on the "distance" between cultural communities -- as more or less irreconcilable, GRECE and its followers twist "the defence of the right to be different" so as to serve the cause of a new and subtle form of apartheid.⁴¹

Unlike the racisms of the colonial age, the "differentialist" racism of GRECE and other groups on the New Right rarely makes claims for the biological superiority of one "race" over another. On the contrary, it is prepared to concede that the concept of "races" as isolatable biological units is flawed, "racial identity" being the product of contingent historical circumstances.

Moreover, this new racism does not seek to eliminate "the other": rather, it insists on respect for ethnic and cultural diversity and the differences these imply. Indeed, the leading intellectual architect of GRECE, Alain de Benoist, argues that "racism is nothing but the denial of difference", be it in the form of xenophobia or in the form of liberal, "humanitarian" integrationist programmes.⁴²

Cultural identity, however, is not portrayed by the New Right as something relative, fluid, multiple-in-form or open to negotiation -- which is the lived experience of those whose daily comings and goings constitute the cultural differences that the New Right now embraces: instead, it is portrayed as a mechanism which, like genes, "functions to lock individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy ... that is immutable and intangible in origin".⁴³

The Road to the Ghetto

Defending ethnic diversity thus depends on preserving the "essence" and "purity" of the supposedly closed cultures into which the New Right divides humanity. This in turn depends on keeping cultures separate, since mixing would cause either ethnic violence (on the premise that people of one culture are incapable of living with or among those with different traditions, life-styles and customs) or the destruction of identities through physical and cultural "interbreeding".⁴⁴ The result is "a politics of exclusion, ranging from demands for 'foreigners'/'aliens' to be sent 'home' to genocide in the form of 'ethnic cleansing'".⁴⁵

It is not hard to imagine where such a politics can lead, not just in Europe but more widely. Guillaume Faye, a leading light in GRECE prior to his departure to Le Front National, is candid:

"In keeping with the core of the right to difference doctrine, we must reject multiracial society and envisage, together with the immigrants themselves, their return to their country of origin."⁴⁶

Another leading figure on the French New Right, is equally explicit:

"It is preferable to avoid mixing and cross-breeding. It is preferable to preserve the superiority of the race to which I belong -- its difference, its originality."⁴⁷

The theme has also been taken up with gusto by Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of Le Front National: "We not only have the right but the duty to defend our national character as well as our right to difference." To be harmonious, Le Pen contends:

"a nation must have a certain ethnic and spiritual homogeneity ... The problem of immigration [must] be solved for the benefit of France by a peaceful and organized return of immigrants."⁴⁸

In Belgium, meanwhile, the right-wing Flemish Nationalist Movement -- Vlaams Blok -- is already advocating special schools to "refamiliarise non-Europeans with their own cultures" (defined, presumably, by Vlaams Blok), prior to their repatriation due to the "incompatibility" of non-European and European cultures.⁴⁹

Elsewhere, in Brazil, conservative landowners (and some Western conservationists) have called for indigenous groups whose members adopt "Western-style" clothes to be denied their rights to their traditional territories, on the grounds that they have "lost" their culture -- as if culture were a discrete object that could be mislaid like a suitcase.

Instead of "difference" being a bulwark against stereotyping and the top-down imposition of identities, it becomes a route to the ghetto, threatening a totalitarian nightmare for those who do not fit into the new order or whose sense of cultural identity does not accord with the ethnicities prescribed by the New Right. "You're Turkish? Well, this is your culture. If you don't behave 'like a Turk', then we must re-educate you." "You're a European married to a Jew? Sorry, you will have to separate. You belong to different cultures ..."

What emerges is a project no less oppressive, culturally homogenising and imperialist than previous racisms: oppressive because the assumed "immutability" of cultures inevitably pigeon-holes people into cultural stereotypes that are not of their own making; culturally homogenising because it is assumed each and every culture has an "authentic" core, deviation from which must be rooted out; and imperialist because the "defence" of cultures justifies the top-down partitioning of existing nations and regions according to the pre-conceived territorial and cultural orthodoxies of the most dominant group. The logical outcome is ethnic separation, ghettoisation and, where the "authentic" culture of one group is derived from its hegemony over another, the legitimising of the subordinate culture's continued domination.⁵⁰

Racism with a Presentable Face?

"Culture" -- viewed as an all-encompassing determinant of human behaviour⁵¹ -- has thus become the latest resting place for those on Europe's Right who seek a discourse for legitimising racism and discrimination which resonates better than biology with the everyday concerns and worries of contemporary Europeans.⁵²

Indeed, as many commentators have stressed, the New Right's espousal of "difference" represents not a conversion to liberal pluralism but a deliberate strategy to make racist sentiments more acceptable to the general public.⁵³ Internal GRECE documents, for example, describe the group's overall objective as "the intellectual education of everyone in whose hands the power of decision will come to rest in the coming years".⁵⁴ Conscious that its views, if stated in the raw, would be unacceptable to the public, the group stresses the need to disguise its real objectives:

"The political aims may under no circumstances be exposed. We have to present our aim particularly as an intellectual and moral revolution, and must be extremely careful in the political strategy."⁵⁵

To that end, it has built up a network of front organisations, including publications and study groups, to ensure, in Geoffrey Harris' words, "that what are really extreme-right ideas enter the very fabric of French intellectual and political life" -- a strategy that has proved highly successful in widening the appeal of neo-fascist groups such as Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National by creating an intellectual environment that is more "understanding" of (and receptive to) overtly racist views.⁵⁶ It has also actively sought to establish links with other movements, such as the Greens.⁵⁷

Political organisation, however, only goes part of the way to explaining the New Right's success in "normalising" racism within many sections of mainstream society: of equal importance is the strategic use it has made of the "differentialist" discourse developed by GRECE to clothe racism in a benign, but radical, language that rehabilitates racism as acceptable politics.

For example, by falsely casting opponents of racism as "universalists" intent on eradicating the differences between cultures, and "differentialists" as the defenders of cultural rights, the New Right has sought to develop a discourse that resonates amongst those who feel their ethnic identities are threatened or those who are evolving new ethnic identities in response to the fragmentation of previous nation-states and the deterritorialisation of national sovereignties. It has also sought to excuse racism by passing it off as just another form of resistance to top-down, universalist, social engineering.⁵⁸ As philosopher and sociologist Renata Salecl observes of the new "meta-racism" of the New Right:

"How would a meta-racist react to a Neo-nazi attack on Turkish women? After expressing his repulsion at the Neo-Nazi violence and sincerely condemning it, he would be quick to add that these events, deplorable as they are, must be located in their context. They are perverted expressions of a real problem, namely that in our contemporary Babylon he experience of belonging to a clearly delimited ethnic community which provides meaning for the individual's life is fast losing ground. The true culprits are, therefore, the cosmopolitan proponents of 'multiculturalism' who advocate the mixing of races and thereby set off natural self-defense mechanisms."⁵⁹

A second tactic, closely allied to above, has been to characterise racism as just another form of identity building -- on a par with other forms of identity building. Indeed, the New Right has wilfully sought to confuse social processes and practices that are actually radically different. For example, the observation that many identities are formed in part by relationships of exclusion is generalised by the New Right into an absolute: exclusion (viewed in the abstract) becomes a "natural" feature of all identity building. Discussion of the form such exclusion takes -- its context, its history, the power relations it gives rise to and from which it springs, its motivation -- is thereby curtailed: all forms of exclusion (read discrimination) are portrayed as equally valid. Racist forms of exclusion ("No Blacks", "No Muslims", "No Irish") are thereby treated as being sociologically equivalent to any set of social or other rules.

In a similar vein, New Right theorists have ably sought to transform racism into nothing more than a deeply-felt ethnocentrism. Racism thus become defendable on the grounds that our ethnocentrism makes "all of us racists", in the words of the late British politician, Enoch Powell. There is a world of difference, however, between the cultural essentialism exhibited through, say, ethnocentric jokes ("the Englishman, the Scotsman and the Irishman") or in the yearning most people feel to be part of a community, and the New Right's systematic attempt to create communities peopled exclusively by one internally-homogenous ethnic group -- in effect, to make exclusion and conformity the organising principle of society. It is the programmatic nature of the authoritarian Right's culturalism (whether exemplified by GRECE in France, by Pauline Hanson's One Nation party in Australia, the Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party in India or elements in Louis Farrakhan's black separatist movement) that makes it such an oppressive and authoritarian -- and, some would say, fascist -- project.⁶⁰

Gaian Sociobiology?

The tendency towards authoritarian cultural essentialism is not restricted to the New Right. It is to be found even amongst radicals who, on other issues, have impressive progressive credentials. Within the Western environmental movement, for example, there is a strong wing whose preoccupation with social stability and "ancient traditions" has led to views on culture and ethnic conflict which accord closely (if coincidentally) with those of the New Right. In Europe, such views are most publicly identified with Edward Goldsmith -- founder and currently co-editor of The Ecologist, co-founder of the International Forum on Globalisation (IFG) and 1993 recipient of the prestigious Right Livelihood Award⁶¹ His major work, The Way: An Ecological World View,⁶² ably articulates the thinking underlying this Tradition--Right or Wrong school of Greens.⁶³

For Goldsmith, the overriding goal of Green politics is to re-establish a "natural social order", "organised on the same plan and governed by the same laws [as] the Cosmos and the natural world".⁶⁴ Tradition provides the blueprint for this all-encompassing plan and religion the means through which it should be instrumentalised in society,⁶⁵ regimenting human relations -- between men and women, within families and communities and between ethnic groups -- so that they accord with the precepts of "Gaia".⁶⁶ The result, many argue, is a "Gaian sociobiology",⁶⁷ which, when it comes to addressing issues of ethnicity, family and community, risks lending itself to deeply authoritarian agendas.

One danger inherent in such Gaian sociobiology is that human rights can all too easily be rendered secondary to considerations of "social" stability, as defined by Gaians. Commenting in an earlier work on the civil strife that has historically racked Northern Ireland, for example, Goldsmith has insisted that Catholics and Protestants constitute separate and implacably opposed "tribal groups", whose differences are now culturally insurmountable; the only lasting solution therefore lies in splitting the two communities apart, forcibly if necessary. Writing three years after the most recent era of "Troubles" flared in 1968, Goldsmith argued:

"The Catholics and the Protestants in Northern Ireland ... constitute two distinct ethnic groups, of different origin, with different manners and traditions and different motivations and capacities. They could occupy the same geographic area and form a single society if they were capable of living in cultural symbiosis with each other, which they have done up to now. The Catholics, however, are no longer willing to fill the lower echelons of the economic hierarchy, as the cultural pattern which previously enabled them to do so has largely broken down. The only remaining solution is to separate them territorially. Ataturk separated Greeks and Turks very successfully, although there was a terrible outcry at the time and it undoubtedly caused considerable inconvenience to the people who were forced to migrate. But should we not be willing to accept measures of inconvenience in order to establish a stable society?"⁶⁸

Entirely missing from such an account is any sense that the "differences" in Northern Ireland are not reducible to those between "Catholics" and "Protestants".

Moreover, it is not possible to categorise the peoples of Northern Ireland into such broad, homogenised camps. Not all Catholics are "Nationalists" (supporters of a united Ireland), nor are all Protestants "Unionists" (supporters of continued membership of the United Kingdom). The experience of Unionist and Republican politics also differs radically for men and women,⁶⁹ whilst class differences may mean that middle-class Catholics have more in common with middle-class Protestants than with their working class co-religionists -- and vice versa. Even those class differences obscure wide divergences between and amongst individuals as to how they approach the conflict -- and their willingness, or unwillingness, to renegotiate existing political structures.

Separate, Separate

More recently, Goldsmith has argued in a similar vein for the separation of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda:

"Only an extremely irresponsible person would suggest that the Tutsis and the Hutu should be made to live together to form a single society. They should quite clearly be separated, and if other African governments refuse to accept this idea it is that they do not want to set a precedent which might encourage other ethnic groups to break away and run themselves rather than submit to the tyrannical and corrupt leadership of the present rulers."⁷⁰

Just about every country in Africa, he argues, is a:

"time-bomb waiting to explode, precisely because each one has been created without any regard whatsoever for the ethnic differences among the people within its borders -- and it is a question of time before the various ethnic groups that make up these artificial countries seek to obtain their independence."⁷¹

Solidarity with progressive independence movements is one thing: carving up Africa according to preconceived "ethnicities" is another. Undoubtedly, colonialism imposed arbitrary states upon the peoples of Africa without consideration for their self-identification. Undoubtedly, too, many ethnic groups have since struggled to assert their right to self-determination, first against the colonial powers and subsequently against post-independence governments. The efforts of Biafra to gain its independence from Nigeria in the 1960s is just one example. However, the narrative of the African "time-bomb" fails to explain many of the conflicts in contemporary Africa, the majority of which reflect a much more complex politics than that suggested by those whose "global" approach to local conflicts leads them to decontextualise the politics -- and even to ignore the politics altogether.

In many cases, pre-colonial ethnic identities have evolved into new (and different) identities which may or may not identify with the supposedly "authentic", "natural" ethnic units of the pre-colonial era. Moreover, the demands of rebel groups in many of the conflicts are not necessarily centred on asserting the rights of one ethnic group to the exclusion of others, nor on the redrawing of existing boundaries to create new "mini-states": on the contrary, many movements seek a fairer deal for all ethnic groups within existing state boundaries and are not linked to territorial claims. The accent is often on challenging the prevalent political structures that foster ethnic exclusion today, rather than making such exclusion the basis for a new political geography for the future.⁷²

Ethnicity in contemporary Africa is "not something primordial, something given, something which defines identity exclusive of all other factors":⁷³ on the contrary, it is shifting, fluid and constantly being reworked in response to changing political, economic and social circumstances.⁷⁴ Nor are there fixed, pre-colonial ethnicities waiting to be liberated. Indeed, the notion that Africa consists of ready-made, authentic, tribal "states-in-waiting" which have only to be hewn out of the national edifices imposed by the colonial powers rests largely on historical fiction. As Terence Ranger, Professor of Race Relations at Oxford University, points out:

"Almost all recent studies of nineteenth-century pre-colonial Africa have emphasized that far from there being a single 'tribal' identity, most Africans moved in and out of multiple identities, defining themselves at one moment as subject to this chief, at another moment as a member of that cult, at another moment as part of this clan, and at yet another moment as an initiate in that professional guild. These overlapping networks of association and exchange extended over wide areas. Thus the boundaries of the 'tribal' polity and the hierarchies of authority within them did not define the conceptual horizons of Africans."⁷⁵

This is not to say that the "tribe" did not feature as a political and social unit in pre-colonial Africa. It sometimes did. But many of the tribes that exist today are less survivals of a pre-colonial past than the products of the administrative or economic practices of colonial powers, practices which created a new political geography in which Africans were administered as "tribes" and where the tribe thus became increasingly central to a person's identity. Indeed, if the tribe has achieved such a defining role in contemporary African politics, it is due less to ancient tradition (much of which has distinctly modern origins)⁷⁶ than to the political manipulation of ethnicity by the state, the needs of urban migrants to maintain links to rural communities in economies where migrant labour is key to economic survival, and a range of other historically contingent (and changing) circumstances.⁷⁷

Naturalising Conflict

Indeed, one problem with approaches that argue for the enforced separation of Protestants and Catholics in the North of Ireland (or Hutus, Tutsis and Twa in Rwanda; Turkish and Greek Cypriots in Cyprus; or Hindus and Muslims in India) lies not only in their authoritarianism and disregard for human rights and history: it lies additionally in the way in which the "Culture-as-Natural Law" argument obscures the political forces that manipulate ethnicity to foment violence or discrimination. Class, gender and even racism itself get "ethnicised" out of the analysis.

Ethnic scapegoating also comes to be viewed as an "inevitable" (if regrettable) response to economic and political insecurity. At a time when globalisation and the imposition of top-down development programmes are disrupting livelihoods worldwide, people who find a home in racist/ethnicist movements are provided with a self-deceptive "explanation" for the violence they inflict on "the other".⁷⁸

In the process, non-racist responses to inter-community violence are frequently suppressed or rendered invisible. Contrary to the position of the New Right and other authoritarian culturalists, embracing the "right to be different" does not have to entail a one-way trip to cultural separation. Nor, again contra the New Right, does the rejection of enforced cultural separation as a political "solution" to ethnic violence necessarily entail the embrace of forced integration. Other responses are widespread and -- even in the midst of conflict -- practised by numerous movements seeking "more diverse forms of transnational allegiance and affiliation", based on equity, pluralism and a respect for the rights of peoples to self-determination.⁷⁹ Yet the very existence of groups that defy the stereotypes -- peace movements, for example, or ecumenical groups -- provides powerful evidence to counter the view that racism, xenophobia and violent discriminatory expressions of ethnicity are somehow "natural" or "predetermined".

As noted earlier, racism and xenophobia are indeed common responses to the tensions and insecurities that underlie many conflicts, but they represent just one set of responses among many -- none of which is more "natural" than the others. Moreover, the very fact that racist movements have to work so hard to manipulate ethnicity towards their own xenophobic ends belies the "naturalist" arguments that ethnic warriors promote. In India, for example, the Hindu Right BJP has assiduously cultivated the notion that Hindu and Muslim are irrevocably opposed, constructing hatred through a deliberate political programme that has involved infiltrating grassroots social movements in an attempt to appropriate their causes for xenophobic ends.⁸⁰ An "explanation" of Hindu-Muslim conflicts that fails to address such manipulation, relying instead on the myth of predetermined hatreds, is no explanation at all. Yet again, it is racist and xenophobic responses which cry out for explanation.

Plural Responses

As stated earlier, none of this is to deny the existence of ethnicity as a social reality -- and a reality, moreover, which is greatly cherished and valued by many people. Stuart Hall, Professor of Sociology at the Open University in the UK, for example, notes that:

"We all speak from a particular place, out of a particular history, out of a particular experience, a particular culture, without being contained by that position ... We are all, in that sense, ethnically located and our ethnic identities are crucial to our subjective sense of who we are."⁸¹

It is, however, to deny that ethnicity is rooted in biology, destiny or in some "authentic" set of unchanging cultural traditions and to insist that its form is always historically contingent and constantly changing. It is also to argue for a politics that rejects those cultural identities whose survival depends on marginalising, displacing and stereotyping other ethnicities.

As such, it is an argument for pluralism -- for cherishing not only the differences between ethnic groups, but also what they have in common. It is, in addition, an argument for equity, since plural societies where power relations are inequitable will almost inevitably lead to the domination of one group by another. It is thus a call for nurturing those cultural, social and economic relationships and practices that enable disparate groups to live together as equals within a wider commonwealth.

Evolving institutional and cultural arrangements that permit such pluralism suggest the urgent need for a politics that respects and relies on difference but which is open to change and the reworking of traditions; that is inquiring, open to debate and respectful of other opinions and ways of living; and that is ever alert to the motivations of those who seek to mobilise around ethnic identities and to the oppressions that result when privileged groups assume a right to decide other peoples' social identities for them. It also suggests a politics which is as ready to challenge the everyday social relations and ideologies that privilege one group over another as it is to challenge the more visible structures of power -- be they transnational corporations (TNCs), populist demagogues or the State -- that create the conditions in which "the seeds of petty resentment sown ... when [different] kinds of underprivileged are brought together"⁸² can be manipulated into ethnic conflict.

Practice, Not Theory

The emphasis here is on politics and the everyday practices of anti-racism. For racism and ethnic hatred are rooted not in the failure of individuals to understand the oppressiveness of their behaviour but in the political struggle over (and manipulation of) identities: if pluralism is merely a call for people to be nicer to each other, it is bound to fail.

Likewise treating racism -- whether in Rwanda or in contemporary Europe -- as a failure on the part of individuals to appreciate their multiple identities or the hybridity of culture will have little impact on those whose politics are rooted in White Power or authoritarian cultural essentialism. As Jonathan Friedman of the University of Lund observes with biting irony:

"If only we understood how totally mixed we all are, there would be no ethnic strife in the world. The source of evil of roots is western nationalism. We need only reject the West and its language of identities to find ourselves once again in the true reality of hybridity. Have a nice day."⁸³

The reality is that rednecks and racists exist; that the hatreds that ethnic chauvinists bring to the identities they forge for themselves are real; and that ethnicity will always be a terrain on which authoritarian political actors, along with numerous others, seek to mobilise. No set of institutional arrangements or approaches to ethnicity can avoid such politicisation of ethnic identities. Even "hybridity", as the Central American experience reveals, can be exploited for political ends that are oppressive. As Friedman notes of the use to which mestizo identity has been put by upper- and middle-class elites faced with rising Maya identity:

"Hybrid ideology has been used to dissipate and disarray Mistiko Indian resistance by "creolising" them from above, by actively criticising their ethnic essentialism. Hybridisation also opened their bounded social identity in such a way that they could not represent themselves as having any claim as a single group. We are all part-Indian, say members of the elite who have much to lose in the face of minority claims. This is also the case in Guatemala, where the Maya are in the majority but where their politics is defused by elite conversion to hybridity."⁸⁴

Neither Left Nor Right?

In short, a politics that fails to engage with the shifting dialectics of racism, class and ethnic chauvinism is unlikely to pose a serious threat to racist movements. On the contrary, if racism is seriously to be challenged, racists must be denied ground on which to operate. Anti-racism should be placed at the centre of movement building, not tacked on as an optional extra.

In the absence of such a commitment, progressive groups can all too easily find themselves lending unwitting support to Far Right groups whose rhetoric appears progressive but disguises an extremely authoritarian agenda. The danger is particularly acute in an era where the New Right has opportunistically moved onto ground which the progressive Left frequently regards (mistakenly) as exclusively its own.

As globalisation reconfigures state power and local economies, so the New (and Old) Right have been quick to exploit the political terrain created by the partial "denationalisation" of economic space and the shifting of many areas of sovereignty from national to supranational bodies.⁸⁵ Growing economic insecurity, rising regional disparities of wealth, increasing social marginalisation and the emergence of numerous movements seeking to "re-root" themselves culturally -- all phenomena which, in their contemporary form, are closely related to the process of globalisation -- have provided fertile ground for those who would blame "immigrants", "foreigners" and minorities for the resulting tensions.

Reacting to such scapegoating, many progressive movements in Europe and the US -- from trade unions to environmentalists -- have highlighted the political and economic causes of increased marginalisation and insecurity. They point, for example, to the neoliberal policies underpinning the increasing insecurity of work, driving down wages and pitting communities against each other in order to attract the inward investment that will supposedly create jobs. They point, too, to the increasing regional tensions that are likely to result as the European Union (EU) moves towards economic and monetary union (EMU) -- and the potential for such tensions to express themselves in increased ethnic violence. And they have called for policies that relocalise economies under greater community control.

The result has been the emergence of an increasingly effective movement challenging economic exclusion and corporate rule. In the process, many movements have seen internal realignments and the forging of new alliances. But, though necessary, the focus on the visible structures of economic exclusion (TNCs, neoliberal trade treaties and the like) has led to a partial obscuring of other, concurrent forms of exclusion -- not least the newly-reworked ideologies which currently underpin and legitimise much discrimination.⁸⁶ "Blood" and "culture" explanations of ethnic conflict are just two examples.

As a consequence, the ground on which globalisation is increasingly being challenged is ground that is as easily occupied by elements of the authoritarian but radical Right as it is by the progressive Left. The impression often gained is that the challenge to globalisation forms a platform shared by both Left and Right.

In reality, no such common platform exists: there are authoritarian responses to globalisation and there are progressive responses -- and the two strands are confused at peril. The rhetoric of being "Neither Left nor Right" -- a slogan first coined with a very different politics in mind⁸⁷ -- is now not just misleading: it is dangerous.⁸⁸

The danger is three-fold. First, a platform shared with authoritarian interests inevitably legitimises those interests, giving them a credibility that they might otherwise not enjoy.⁸⁹ Second, such platforms send a public message to many groups who might otherwise be allies that progressives are prepared to set aside certain core issues (anti-racism, for example) in the fight against globalisation. Indeed, in the US, many political analysts now view the current overtures by the authoritarian Right to the environmental movement as a deliberate tactical move to separate environmentalists from potential allies in the social justice movement (see Box: The Greening of Hate, p.18). Third, the failure to place opposition to the ideologies underpinning social exclusion on a par with opposition to economic exclusion gives wider scope for authoritarian interests to shape the localisms that are emerging in response to corporate rule -- scope which might not be so available if the focus of opposition was not concentrated so exclusively on economic exclusion.

Attractive -- and necessary -- as it might be to evolve as wide an opposition to globalisation as possible, it is surely also critical to have in mind where that opposition is likely to lead. The alliances that progressives enter into -- albeit tacitly -- will inevitably influence the outcome of their opposition. If they are serious in their commitment to "localisms" that are cosmopolitan, open and equitable, it is not enough to "talk the talk". More important still is to "walk the walk" -- for whom we chose to walk with ultimately plays a large part in determining where we end up walking.