Concept map

52 The concept of racism

Chapter 2

analytical concept. Using the concepts of racialisation, racism and exclusionary practice to identify specific means of effecting the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production, one is able to stress consistently and rigorously the role of human agency, albeit always constrained by particular historical and material circumstances, in these processes, as well as to recognise the specificity of particular forms of oppression.

Nationalism and racism: antithesis and articulation

It is sometimes said that butlers only truly exist in England. Other countries, whatever title is used, have only manservants. I tend to believe this is true. Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race is capable of. Continentals - and by and large the Celts, as you will no doubt agree - are as a rule unable to control themselves in moments of strong emotion, and are thus unable to maintain a professional demeanour other than in the least challenging of situations.

(Ishiguro 1990: 43)

INTRODUCTION

More than a decade ago, Tom Naim claimed provocatively that the theorisation of nationalism was one of the greatest failures of Marxism (1981: 329). It is not clear whether this charge, or world events themselves, were responsible for the subsequent flurry of theoretical writing on nationalism by writers who identify themselves in one way or another with the Marxist traditior. (e.g. Anderson 1983, Blaut 1987, Hobsbawm 1990, Nimni 1991).

Fortunately, most of these writers have avoided attempting to rectify this failure by seeking to imagine, on the basis of the scattered fragments and claims throughout the ‘collected works’, what Marx would have said if he had lived longer. While there is some value in identifying and reflecting on the nature of Marx’s theory of nationalism (Haupt et al. 1974, Cummins 1980, Connor 1984, Blaut 1987, Nimni 1991), such as it was (although to call it a theory is perhaps to exaggerate the significance of the fragments), its problems and contradictions, along with the political transformation of the world capitalist system in the past century, limit its

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utility in the light of contemporary realities. The theorising of the past decade (both Marxist and non-Marxist) has been especially concerned with the current significance of nationalism, but has also sought to trace its origins in the interstices of the historical development of capitalism or, in the case of the influential writing of Gellner (1983), in the transition from agrarian to industrial society.

The publication of these texts has been paralleled by an increasing interest in the nature and origin of nationalism on the part of writers concerned with the expression of contemporary racisms in Europe (e.g. Gilroy 1987, Balibar and Wallerstein 1991). In various ways, these writers have argued that the expression of contemporary racisms derives in part from the renewal and revision of nationalism which, in turn, is shaped by the consequences of decolonisation and of the internationalisation of capitalist production since the end of the Second World War. These arguments have led to discussion about the nature of the articulation of racism and nationalism expressed in the state’s attempt in western Europe to reconstruct hegemony at a time of social dis- and reorganisation of capitalist social formations.

Most of the recent Marxist attempts to construct a theory of nationalism refer to its articulation with racism, although only Anderson evaluates this articulation in any detail (1983: 141-54). However, Naim, in the course of his pioneering contribution to the analysis of English nationalism (see also Wright 1985, Colls and Dodd 1986, Newman 1987), offers a number of theses about the interrelated influence and role of racism which warrant consideration (Naim 1981: 273-8, 294). Although it is doubtful whether either Anderson or Naim would claim to have provided a systematic analysis of the articulation of nationalism and racism, each advances a number of theoretical and historical generalisations.

Anderson argues that nationalism and racism are antithetic ideologies (1983: 136): ‘The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history.’ Furthermore, he rejects Naim’s view that racism derives from nationalism (Naim 1981: 337). But Naim fails to offer a coherent justification for this assertion, and most of his comments on the relationship between racism and nationalism focus on a single historical example, that is the role of racism in the expression of English nationalism since 1945. Naim’s analysis of this role concentrates primarily on the ideology articulated by, and the political impact of, a single politician (Enoch Powell). He maintains that racism has only a

limited potential for political mobilisation under the banner of a right-wing nationalism in England (1981: 276), and that the resort to racism in England results from the absence of the main mobilising myth of nationalism, an idea of ‘ the people’ as an active political subject (1981: 294-5, for a critique see Newman 1987). In other words, the expression of racism is a secondary substitute for the absence of a coherent, modem and bourgeois English nationalism.

• advancing these claims, Naim and Anderson pay only cursory attention to the nature and history of racism. This contrasts with their considerably more detailed and analytically sophisticated consideration of the nature and history of nationalism. Partly for this reason, their comments on the interrelationship between nationalism and racism, despite their innovatory character, are problematic. While there are important differences in the nature and reproduction of the ideologies of racism and nationalism, their interrelationship is not as fixed as Anderson and Naim, in their different ways, suggest. Contra Anderson, I shall argue that nationalism and racism are not necessarily distinct and antithetical ideologies, while contra Naim, I shall argue that racism does not derive from nationalism as if it were some secondary, dependent and derivative ideological form.
• the light of these arguments, I shall evaluate the influential claim that a ‘new racism’ has been invented (Barker 1981). Barker’s argument, while advanced within the Marxist tradition, was not intended to correct the historical failure identified by Naim concerning nationalism. Barker is silent about nationalism: hence, he makes no attempt to consider the extent to which the ‘new racism’ has drawn upon, or is expressive of, nationalism. In other words, he ignores the possibility of an articulation of nationalism and racism, largely because he has inflated the scope of the concept of racism so that it incorporates nationalism.

These arguments are supported by a more limited range of historical and empirical material than that employed by Anderson. But my disagreement is with one facet of his argument and I am in broad agreement with his central thesis. My method is closer to Naim, who makes a number of theoretical claims about the nature and origin of nationalism which are sustained primarily by a detailed analysis of the example of the United Kingdom. The empirical/historical content of this chapter is largely limited to the UK, although the context is broadened in order to take account of the influence of British colonialism.

This empirical focus on the UK requires a preliminary comment. As elsewhere, the process of nation-state formation in the UK incorporated at different times emergent or extant states and culturally differentiated

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populations. The mode of incorporation left intact an institutional basis for the reproduction of quasi-national political identities, particularly in Scotland. There is therefore a sense in which the UK remains a multinational state. Consequently, it is necessary to remain aware of the significance of distinctions between these separate national political units and national identities (for example, between England and Scotland, and between English and Scottish national (political) identities). At the same time, the UK constitutes a single legal-constitutional unit, although with England as its core, a situation that sustains a more fluid English/British identity within England. This elasticity does not occur in Scotland and Wales, where a sharper distinction with England tends to be drawn, a distinction that creates a greater ambiguity about Britishness (e.g. Miles 1987c). I shall comment briefly on the significance of this for the articulation of nationalism and racism.

THE PROCESS OF INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION

The ideas of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ are categories of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. They identify socially constructed boundaries which separate the world’s population into discrete groups which are commonly (although not exclusively) alleged to be naturally distinct. Considered abstractly, the criteria signified in the process of categorisation and division are discrete. Concerning the idea of ‘race’, the object of signification is biological: commonly, it is a phenotypical feature (e.g. skin colour, hair type, shape of the head), but genetic and other less immediately visible biological phenomena (e.g. blood) are also signified. In the case of the idea of ‘nation’, the criterion is usually cultural in character (e.g. language, ‘way of life’). In practice, it is often difficult to sustain this distinction because ‘cultural’ characteristics can be represented as ‘natural’ and therefore biological endowments (e.g. Taguieff 1990: Chapters 1 and 3).

In both cases, the signified criteria may be invented or imagined. But they can also be real in the sense that the signified characteristics are empirically verifiable: it is indeed the case that some people have a pinkish/white skin or speak a language that is described as German. The facts of difference may not necessarily be in dispute although the definition of naturalness is problematic, especially where it is alleged that those possessing the characteristics form a naturally constituted group. Herein lies a process of reification because (as discussed in Chapter 1 ) the criteria of inclusion and exclusion are interpreted as the determinants or signs of the groups’ difference, rather than the act of signification which

attributes meaning to the differentiating feature and the subsequent inclusionary and exclusionary practices that place members of the groups in different structural locations.

Such an argument emphasises the role of ideological construction, a theme that has been prominent in the analysis of the idea of ‘nation’ and of nationalism for some time (e.g. Kohn 1945, Anderson 1983: 14-16). This emphasis is less consistently evident in the case of the idea of ‘race’ (but see Chapter 1 and Miles 1982,1989a). That both ideas or categories are socially constructed and reproduced can be illustrated by extending the relevance of Anderson’s conception of the ‘nation’ as a specific form of imagined community (1983: 15-16) to comprehend the way in which the idea of ‘race’ serves as a socially constructed category of inclusion and exclusion. Within Anderson’s theoretical framework, this is a valid extension of his analysis because he argues that most communities are imagined, and that the most important criterion by which to distinguish between imagined communities is the style of their imagination (1983: 6).

Like ‘nations’, ‘races’ (in the sense popularised by nineteenth-century European science) are imagined in the dual sense that they have no real biological foundation and that all those included by the signification can never know each other. Moreover, they are commonly imagined as communities in the sense that the population (qua ‘race’) is thought to be bound together by a common feeling of fellowship: possession of the signified phenotypical characteristics (e.g. skin colour) is interpreted as a sign that the persons share some fundamental essence that constitutes an unalienable bond between them. Hence, ‘races' are also imagined as limited in the sense that, once the boundary is marked by the phenotypical characteristic, it defines the presence of other ‘races’. Utilising Anderson’s formal definition of ‘nation’ as a type of imagined community, the only criterion which does not apply in the case of the idea of ‘race’ is that of sovereignty.

Hence, formally, the ideas of ‘nation’ and ‘race’ both have the potential to become the defining criterion of particular imagined communities. In the case of the idea of ‘race’, this is well illustrated by the recent writing of Omi and Winant (1986: 61-8) and Gilroy (1987: 38-40), who employ the concept of ‘racial formation’ to refer to the process by which various social forces shape and reshape the meaning and boundaries of racialised categories. For example, those excluded by racism may use the idea of ‘race’ to define the focus and parameters of strategies of resistance to exclusion. Thus, these people having been excluded as an inferior ‘race’, the meanings are inverted in order to

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construct a positive identity and to define the population that becomes a political subject in the name of the idea of ‘race’, conceived as an imagined community of resistance.

But this does not exhaust the comparison of the ideas of ‘race’ and ‘nation’. They also define populations in a way which includes a range of social differentiation within the resulting imagined communities. Viewed from the perspective of Marxist theory, these are supraclass categories because, collectively, those people signified and categorised by skin colour or language, etc., usually occupy a range of different structural locations in the relations of production. Moreover, each can be used to make an ideological appeal to an imagined commonality in order to create a sense of community which overrides the conflicting interests arising from the social relations of production.

Furthermore, both categories are simultaneously inclusive and exclusive. In a process of differentiation by (for example) skin colour, the identification of Us as ‘white’ is an inclusive process which is paralleled by the exclusion from the imagined community of ‘whiteness’ of all those who lack this characteristic. In other words, by defining Us as white, an Other is synchronically defined as those who lack that particular quality: beyond the boundary of ‘whiteness’ there exist Others who share the quality of being ‘non-white’. The same consequence results where the process of differentiation functions in reverse, that is, by an initial act of exclusion rather than inclusion. If the Other is initially differentiated as ‘black’, this signification is an implicit creation of a boundary beyond which We are situated because We lack that characteristic and possess some other (e.g. ‘whiteness’).

At a more general level of abstraction, the signification of a population as a ‘race’ (or a ‘nation’) by reference to areal or imagined characteristic X is to signify simultaneously the existence of other ‘races’ (or ‘nations’) which are identifiable by the absence of X (and the presence of Y, Z ... ). Thus, where ego identifies alter as a member of a particular ‘race’ (or ‘nation’), ego is also engaged in a process of self-identification as a member of another ‘race’ (or ‘nation’). Similarly, the idea of ‘race’ may be employed by ego as a mode of self-identification, one that also creates other ‘races’ beyond ‘one’s own’. Any act of differentiation and categorisation using the ideas of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ is a synchronous act of inclusion and exclusion, whether or not ego or alter are signified explicitly as possessing or lacking the criterion in question. This applies equally to the use of the general categories of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ as well as to the signification of specific characteristics in order to differentiate between alleged ‘races’ and ‘nations’.

When distinguishing racism from nationalism, Anderson assumes (mistakenly) that the category of ‘race’ is always used as a method of negatively evaluated exclusion and that the category of ‘nation’ always functions as a positively evaluated category of inclusion. In reality, as we shall see below, the ‘race’ category can also be used as a positively evaluated means of inclusion, as a means of self-identification, which synchronically excludes. Moreover, use of the idea of ‘race’ for the purpose of self-identification and differentiation can function to define the parameters of a ‘nation’. In other words, the ideas of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ can be overlapping categories, each functioning to define the parameters of the other.

RACISM AND NATIONALISM: FINDING THE COMMON GROUND

The ideas of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ have each been placed at the centre of formally distinct theoretical formations which seek to explain social and historical variation and to characterise that differentiation as natural. The creation in western Europe of ‘-isms’ around these two criteria of social classification occurred at the same time. During the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the idea of ‘race’ was appropriated by an ever-increasing number of biologists and anthropologists who were enquiring into the significance of human physiological variation. Many of them became obsessed with the classification of the human species into discrete groups by reference to one or more phenotypical characteristic (Stepan 1982, Gould 1984). Banton described the consequence of their endeavours as the ‘doctrine of racial typology’ (1977: 47) while Comas referred to it as ‘scientific racism’ (1961: 303).

Scientific racism claimed, first, that the human species could be divided into a number of discrete biological types which determined the endowment and behaviour of individuals, and which therefore explained the cultural variation of the human species. It followed that conflict between individuals and groups was the consequence of their biological constitution. Second, it was argued that the ‘races’ of which the world’s human population was composed could be ordered hierarchically: certain ‘races’ were destined for biological and cultural superiority over the other, inferior ‘races’.

These arguments gained considerable credibility. In part, this was because they were advanced by people who practised as scientists in a period when science was, for the first time, widely regarded as proficient in revealing the truth about the world (Stepan 1982: xv). Equally, if not

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more, significant, these arguments were used to interpret political and economic conflicts in various parts of the world where, for example, the British state, merchants and capitalists had economic and political interests (Curtin 1965:383, Biddiss 1979:11-31). Scientific racism could therefore explain and legitimate the dominant role of British capitalism within the emergent world economic system.

It follows that one of the more general characteristics of racism is that it is an ideology which signifies some real or alleged biological characteristic as a criterion of other group membership and which also attributes that group with other, negatively evaluated characteristics. The racialised Other is additionally conceived as a biologically selfreproducing population through historical time (Miles 1989a: 78-9). But (and this is a point that has remained suppressed in my earlier writing) the racialisation of the Other as a naturally inferior group can equally well be effected by the identification of a collective We as a naturally constituted population characterised by a set of positively evaluated characteristics. This is because the imagined community of ‘race’ is always a limited community beyond which other, racialised imagined communities are considered to exist. Both processes of signification and representation constitute analytically distinct moments of racism. Racist ideologies are therefore relational: they imagine and construct the existence of a multiplicity of racialised populations whose attributed and differentially evaluated characteristics refract and so define each other, often (but not exclusively) in binary, hierarchical oppositions.

The idea of ‘nation’ was theorised concurrently with the theorisation of‘race’ (Kohn 1945: 3, cf. Hobsbawm 1990):

Nationalism as we understand it is not older than the second half of the eighteenth century. Its first great manifestation was the French Revolution, which gave the new movement an increased dynamic force. Nationalism had become manifest, however, at the end of the eighteenth century almost simultaneously in a number of widely separated European countries.

The object of this signification and theorisation was also the world’s population, which was divided into discrete units. It was argued that the human species was naturally divided into ‘nations’, each of which had a distinctive and unique character and mode of expression. ‘Nations’ were eternal and had destinies which they were impelled to realise. And each of these naturally constituted populations was bound to a defined territory where it had the right to live and to organise its own affairs without the interference of other ‘nations’.

Thus, the boundary of the ‘nation’ was also the boundary of a self-contained political system (Gellner 1983: 1). Occupation of a territory and the organisation of some form of political representation, so the theory of nationalism continued, would ensure the full realisation of the ‘nation’s’ specific qualities. Smith claims (1983: 23, see also 1991: 73-4):

Fundamentally, nationalism fuses three ideals: collective self- determination of the people, the expression of national character and individuality , and finally the vertical division of the world into unique nations each contributing its special genius to the common fund of humanity.

The ideology of nationalism therefore specifies an ideal political organisation of the world into nation states, founded on the principle of popular sovereignty. In the context of its formation, nationalism was therefore a revolutionary doctrine because it sought to overturn monarchy and aristocratic government by an appeal to the popular will of ‘the people’ who were the ‘nation’ (Hobsbawm 1990: 18-20).

In this sense, unlike the theorisation of ‘race’, the theorisation of ‘nation’ led to a specific political project. For much of the nineteenth century, nationalism was synonymous with a struggle for political sovereignty within defined spatial boundaries and for some form of representative government, although the franchise was usually limited to, at best, just half of the adult population (i.e. men). Nationalist theory, therefore, identified particular objectives which had specific political consequences for the formation and organisation of the nation state. By way of contrast, there was no single political strategy that emerged from the general theory of biological, hierarchical differentiation expressed in the idea of ‘race’. This was not only because there was little agreement about the boundaries between the supposed ‘races’, but also because scientific racism did not posit a single, coherent political object.

The theorisation of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ tookplace at a time of ‘internal’ European political and economic reorganisation and ‘external’ colonial expansion, in the course of which the range of human cultural and physiological variation became more widely known to a larger number of people. The extension of capitalist relations of production increased the circulation of commodities and of people, and this increasing mobility, migration and social interaction provided part of the foundation upon which the ideologies of racism and nationalism were constructed. The increasing profusion of physiological and cultural variation, as recognised in western Europe, became the object of intellectual curiosity

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and, thereby, of the theoretical practice of scientists and philosophers. But it also became the focus of political attention and action as populations within and beyond Europe were nationalised and racialised by the state, which was seeking to achieve broader objectives (see Chapter 3). The mental production of scientists and philosophers therefore had a specific utility for those who had more practical and immediate concerns and interests in the promotion of capitalism within emergent national boundaries.

Nationalism and racism nevertheless occupied a common terrain in so far as both posited a natural division of the world’s population into discrete categories. Furthermore, these apparently distinct categories could be interrelated so that they overlapped or became synonymous. This potential was grounded in the very nature of scientific racism, which asserted a deterministic link between biology and cultural variation and expression. Because ‘nations’ were identified as naturally occurring groups identifiable by cultural differentiae, it was logically possible to assert that these symbols of ‘nation’ were themselves grounded in ‘race’, that ‘blood or race is the basis of nationality, and that it exists externally and carries with it an unchangeable inheritance’ (Kohn 1945: 13). A racialised nationalism could then conceive of certain ‘nations’ as eternally contaminated, and therefore outside history (cf. Anderson 1983: 136).

And, indeed, such arguments became increasingly common during the nineteenth century as the ‘nation’ was imagined less as a ‘people’ bound together by a common interest in the overthrow of political domination by an absolute monarch or an autocratic landed aristocracy (or both), and more as a population defined primarily by a certain language, set of customs and discrete historical origin (Hobsbawm 1990:19-22). In such circumstances, the ‘nation’ was increasingly constructed in opposition to ‘foreigners’, both inside and beyond the territory claimed by the ‘nation’ as its ancestral ‘home’. The early revolutionary content of nationalism was further weakened by the appropriation of this culturalist identification of the ‘nation’ in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by right-wing political forces (Hobsbawm 1990: 102-8). Given, too, the naturalising component of both nationalism and racism, ‘races’ and ‘nations’ became virtually synonymous in the thoughts of many intellectuals, politicians and ‘men of practical affairs’.

One example of such meshing is found in the writing of Robert Knox, who was one of the most influential European advocates of racism during the middle of the nineteenth century (Banton 1987: 54-9, also Stepan 1982). He was concerned primarily with the extent to which

intra-European conflicts were grounded in ‘race’ (Biddiss 1972: 572), the significance of which is discussed in Chapter 3. In his key work, Knox claimed in the opening pages: ‘The fact, the simple fact, remains just as it was: men are of different races. Now, the object of these lectures is to show that in human history race is everything’ (1850:2). Consequently, for Knox: ‘The results of the physical and mental qualities of a race are naturally manifested in its civilisation, for every race has its form of civilisation’ (1850:56).

Knox’s determinism was absolute. He claimed that each ‘race’ struggled to form its own laws, literature and language in accordance with its biological characteristics. And because these cultural phenomena were biologically determined, they could not be socially transmitted (1850: 6). By implication, each ‘race’ needed to reside in a limited territory where its distinctive capacity for ‘civilisation’ could be realised. For Knox, ‘race’ and ‘nation’ were therefore interrelated, even synonymous. This is evident in Knox’s concern about the ‘multiracial’ character of Britain (1850: 378):

The really momentous question for England, as a nation, is the presence of three sections of the Celtic race still on her soil; the Caledonian, or Gael; the Symbri, or Welsh; and the Irish, or Erse; and how to dispose of them.

In Knox’s racist theory of history, the all-determining character of ‘race’ shaped all aspects of cultural expression and capacity, with the result that the category of ‘nation’ dissolved into that of ‘race’: the interdependence of the categories was hierarchical, and biology dominated (cf. Banton 1987: 57). A disciple of Knox, Kelbume King, developed this articulation in an essay titled ‘An Inquiry into the Causes which have led to the Rise and Fall of Nations’ which was published in 1876 (reprinted in Biddiss 1979: 173-86). The object of historical analysis was presented as a changing sequence of dominant ‘nations', the process and pattern of change being explained as a function of ‘race’. Distinguishing between pure and mixed ‘races’. King interpreted European history as a continuous sequence of the ‘rise and fall of nations’ in which ‘race’ was the determining force.

Similar arguments were formulated by others elsewhere in Europe. In France, Gobineau also argued that ‘race’ was the absolute determinant of historical development (cited in Biddiss 1970:41, see also Todorov 1989: 153-64):

I was gradually penetrated by the conviction that the racial question

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overshadows all other problems of history, that it holds the key to them all, and that the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny.

Consequently, the rise and fall of ‘nations’ was, for Gobineau, the result of degeneration. A ‘nation’ degenerated when (cited in Biddiss 1970:59):

the people has no longer the same intrinsic value as it had before, because it has no longer the same blood in its veins, continual adulterations having gradually affected the quality of that blood. In other words, though the nation bears the name given by its founders, the name no longer connotes the same race.

Writers such as Gobineau and Knox represent a particular strand of nineteenth-century historical writing within Europe. Not all nationalist and racist theories took such a deterministic form (Todorov 1989), and, moreover, their arguments were challenged by others who rejected to varying degrees biologically deterministic theories of social history. Nevertheless, their historical interpretation demonstrates that the categories of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ are not necessarily antipathetic but can be ordered in a hierarchical interdependence in which ‘race’ determines ‘nation’. In these analyses, the two ideas function jointly as categories of inclusion/exclusion. I shall illustrate this shortly by reference to a tradition of English historical writing which employed the idea of ‘race’ to explain the origin of the English ‘nation’.

Of course, the categories of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ predate the construction of the ideologies of racism and nationalism, and each has its own history of shifting meanings. By itself, this does not obviate the argument that racism can be an integral element of nationalism: the purported existence of a hierarchical division of the world’s population into ‘races’ advanced by scientific racism often served as the initial differentiation, upon which claims about the political self-determination of naturally divided populations were erected. This is evident in certain fascist ideologies (e.g. Nolte 1965: 277-86, Hayes 1973: 20-30).

Nevertheless, in the light of recent arguments which conflate the ideologies of racism and nationalism (arguments which will be discussed further below), it is necessary to clarify the divergences between the two ideologies in order to sustain the formal distinction between them. There are two aspects to the formal analytical distinction proposed here. First, there is no necessary reason why any particular ‘nation’ should be naturalised and identified by ‘race’. ‘Nations’ can be identified by (sometimes naturalised) cultural criteria as well as by a constituency of

common political interest, with cultural criteria subordinated or even ignored. Second, nationalism is an ideology which has an explicit political objective as a constituent defining element, that is, the formation of a supraclass political unit within which there is collective mass political organisation and representation. The political principles of nationalism may not be democratic but they have always been populist (Naim 1981: 41). No similar political objective constitutes a defining feature of the ideology of racism.

RACISM AND NATIONALISM IN ENGLISH HISTORY

While the ideology of nationalism was created in the late eighteenth century, interest in tracing the supposed origin and character of the people that constituted a ‘nation’ preceded the French and Industrial Revolutions that so decisively shaped the conjuncture in which nationalism emerged. Thus, while nationalism is certainly a modern phenomenon, the formation of the original ‘historic nation states’ of Europe, usually under the control of absolute monarchies (Naim 1981: 107), was facilitated by the creation of myths of origin and character by the dominant class (cf. Smith 1991).

In other words, some European nation states were created in the absence of nationalism, but nevertheless with the assistance of legitimating ideologies of origin and difference. For some four centuries, the idea of ‘race’ has been prominent in English historical and political writing whenever an assessment of the origin and characteristics of the English as a people and of the English nation has been made (Banton 1977: 16-26). By the mid-seventeenth century, there was (MacDougall 1982:49) ‘the first comprehensive presentation in English of a theory of national origin based on the belief in the racial superiority of the German people, a theme repeated a thousand times in succeeding centuries’.

This myth of origin was shaped by two political events. The first was the English Reformation. In order to sustain their challenge to a church based in Rome, the defenders and ideologists of the Reformation identified the existence of, and their interests with, an autonomous Christian church in Saxon England. Second, the English Civil War was waged over the power of Parliament. Those opposed to the monarchy claimed that Parliament was an institution of great antiquity, with origins in the German democratic tradition, from which the Saxons were considered to have originated (Banton 1977: 16-18, MacDougall 1982: 31-2, 56-62, Newman 1987: 189-91). Hence, in mid-seventeenth- century England, the ideas of the existence of an Anglo-Saxon church and

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Parliament, and of an original Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ suppressed and oppressed by a foreign ‘race’ since the Norman invasion in 1066, legitimated political revolution. The result was a conception of Englishness which was associated with a supposedly inherent capacity for freedom (a capacity materialised in the antiquity of Parliament). This image of racialised national origin and character has since been utilised in different conjunctures by the state as an element of its hegemonic strategy (e.g. Colls 1986: 30-1, Colley 1989: 173-5) and by radical political movements seeking to legitimate their challenge to the ruling class (Newman 1987: 159-225).

The idea of ‘race’ employed in these seventeenth-century discourses referred to descent or lineage rather than to the existence of discrete biological categories of people ranked in a fixed hierarchy (Banton 1977: 18-25). Nevertheless, the idea of lineage suggested the inheritance of characteristics and traditions through time and therefore a certain kind of fixity that was natural and eternal: it is but a short step from the idea of inheritance then to utilise notions such as ‘breeding’ and ‘blood’ to sustain a conception of inviolable difference expressed through history. The result closely approximates that created by the racialised typologies of scientific racism. Such a conception was expressed in the profusion of handbills, broadsheets and songsheets that were distributed widely in England in 1803 after the passing of the Militia Service Bill in the context of the outbreak of war between Britain and France: English blood provided the metaphor that linked past with present in an unbroken chain, creating a superlative stereotype of the English, against which an image of the French ‘character’ was invented in binary opposition. Thus, manifesting this ‘character’, the French were, inter alia, mad, monsters, beasts, criminals and savages, and were thought to be especially susceptible to a perverted sexuality (Cottrell 1989: 260-9, see also Newman 1987:228-33). In the course of the struggle for world economic and political domination in the nineteenth century between European states and bourgeoisies, nationalism and racism were often entangled in this way.

Moreover, given the interconnection between the idea of an Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ (an idea that less consistently sustains an imagination of Britain as a nation, because of the presence of supposedly Celtic ‘races’, but ideological consistency is also subordinate to ideological effectivity) and a sense of historically transmitted Englishness, the subsequent shift towards the idea of ‘race’ as a fixed biological category ensured that the Englishness came to be viewed in fixed terms by the nineteenth century. Thereafter, a proportion of the English population

regarded themselves as a discrete biological ‘race’ whose superiority allegedly originated in their German origins, in the inherent courage and desire for freedom on the part of the Saxons, in the inherent superiority of their language and institutions (especially Parliament) and in a natural ability for science and reason (MacDougall 1982: 94, Hayes 1973: 33).

The idea of the existence of the English as a superior ‘race’ was an inclusive categorisation which necessarily had exclusive implications, especially where social relations were established with populations who were not so fortunately endowed by ‘nature*. The colonial project, established by the activities of English merchant capital in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, provided one such context, while competitive commodity production within Europe provided another. Concerning the former (MacDougall 1982: 129-30):

On balance, the myth of Anglo-Saxonism served England’s national purposes well. Belief in their racial supremacy encouraged visionary Englishmen to look beyond their shores to other continents and proceed to build a great world empire to support a vibrant domestic society.

While this conclusion conflates a complex process into a simplistic, one-way determination, the construction of a sense of Englishness upon the idea of ‘race’ was developed not only in relation to political conflicts within Europe, but also in relation to external economic and political interests beyond Europe. This construction had a long genesis which can be traced at least as far back as the early written records of English explorers who established contact with Africans from the midseventeenth century. This contact led to a reconsideration of a number of important ideological assumptions about a range of issues ranging from the validity of biblical explanation to the criteria for beauty (Walvin 1973: 21-2, Jordan 1974: 3-25). Subsequent relations with African and other populations were increasingly shaped by economic considerations in the light of the expanding activity of merchant capital. And the idea of ‘race’ had an increasing utility in explaining the nature of those populations and the subordinate economic position to which they were assigned as a source of unfree labour. I have analysed elsewhere the complex interaction between this economic dimension and the political and ideological relations in the generation and reproduction of racism in England (Miles 1982: 95-120,1987c).

Here, the most significant point is that this racism locked together in a symbolic embrace a number of populations with very different historical origins: seen with English eyes, the English ‘race’ and the various

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colonised ‘races ’ mirrored the qualities of each other in an interdependent hierarchy. Structured by the discourse of ‘race’, the superiority of one was refracted by the inferiority of the other. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the idea of ‘race’ was central to a world view, articulated and reproduced by the English bourgeoisie and sections of the working class, which served as a category of synchronic inclusion and exclusion. This ideological construction had a phenomenal adequacy because there was a real difference in productive relations and material wealth between England and much of the rest of the world at this time (Curtin 1965: 293-4). This material difference warranted explanation, and racism provided one.

However, this material and political superiority was not as ‘eternal’ as some versions of nationalism professed. By the end of the nineteenth century, British economic and political domination within the world capitalist system was under threat from a number of sources within Europe and beyond. The age of imperialism exposed the extent to which other European nation states and other territorially based capitalisms, not to mention competing colonising forces (such as the Boers in South Africa), were in a position to challenge British domination. It was during the last quarter of the nineteenth century that a new, right-wing English patriotism, which was simultaneously royalist and racist, was created against this background of changing international relations (Summers 1981: 73-4, Cunningham 1989: 77-8). Both the Boer War and the growing economic and military power of the recently unified German nation became potent symbols of the potential for national decline and for the loss of empire, and therefore also the point of departure for a discourse of national regeneration as part of a strategy intended to neutralise such threats (Summers 1989: 241). While this confirms the importance of the colonial Empire as a material base for the reproduction of racialised conceptions of Self and Other, it also demonstrates that the self-identity of the British nation as expressive of a distinct ‘race’ was intimately connected with changing circumstances within Europe: the whole world was racialised, including Europe, in an attempt to comprehend the rise of competing European capitalisms, each embodied in a separate national shell, and each seeking its ‘destiny’ on the world stage (see Chapters 3 and 5).

What is significant about the many strands that ran through the debate within Britain at this time was the way in which the idea of ‘race’ underpinned the idea of the English or British nation that was in need of resuscitation: ‘race’ was employed centrally as a category of inclusion, as a means of sustaining a positive self-identification (cf. Barkan 1992:

1. 65). For example, with the vocal support of a number of pressure groups (Summers 1981), militarism was part of the state’s solution: it was argued that the defence of the nation’s interests required a fit and virile national army. The Director-General of the Army Medical Service told the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration in 1903 that ‘Were all classes of the community able to provide their offspring with ample food and air space, a healthy race would be produced, and the proper material to fill the ranks of the Army would probably soon be obtained’ (Summers 1989: 242). Implicit in such schemes was an inclusive (supraclass), racialised concept of nation, albeit one which implicitly conceded that superiority was not assumed ‘naturally’ (for the quality of the ‘race’ had declined) but could nevertheless be restored.
2. such means, the regeneration of the ‘imperial race’ became a practical priority for the British state. Joseph Chamberlain was one prominent member of the ruling class who employed the discourse of ‘race’ and blood to characterise Anglo-Saxons as ‘bom to govern’ and as the leading force in world history. Hence, for Chamberlain, the future of the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ was inseparable from the maintenance of Empire because it was, by definition, an ‘imperial race’ (Mock 1981: 193-4). And the prime responsibility for producing this ‘imperial race’ fell to women, who were cast in the role of breeders of men. For example, within the eugenics movement, there was concern about the ‘new women’ who were thought less fit 'to become the mothers of a stronger and more virile race, able to keep Britain in its present proud position among the nations of the world’, as one doctor expressed it in 1911 (cited in Davin 1989: 212). Motherhood therefore had to be taught so that women would fulfil their primary, ‘natural’ purpose, the preservation and improvement of the ‘English race’.

Preservation and improvement of the ‘race’ was thought to be only one part of the task if national superiority was to be assured on a world scale. The age of imperialism had witnessed a scramble for new colonial settlements by the leading European nation states and this had promoted fears that sparsely settled British colonies might be overrun by other European ‘races’ with pretensions to imperial pre-eminence. It was suggested in 1905 that the maintenance of the Empire ‘would be best based upon the power of a white population proportionate in numbers, vigour and cohesion to the vast territories which the British democracies in the Mother Country and the Colonies control’ (cited in Davin 1989: 204). Given the high rate of child mortality and a falling birth rate, this solution again placed women as the bearers of children in the front line of the defence of the ‘imperial race’ that comprised the English or British nation.

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But for the Fabian, Sydney Webb, and for many others, reproducing the ‘race’ was also a domestic necessity. In 1907, Webb advocated an increase in the British population and expressed concern that the supposedly fitter and more virile sections were limiting the size of their families. He believed there was a danger that, if the less desirable elements of the British population continued to ‘breed’ at their current rate, there would be an overall deterioration of the English ‘race’ and the numbers would be made up by ‘freely-breeding alien immigrants’ (cited in Davin 1989: 214). Thus, Webb added his voice to a broader strand of concern that the national interest was threatened by a quantitative and qualitative decline in the English or British ‘race’. The ideas of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ were effectively synonymous in this early twentieth-century debate about the identity and future of the English or the British in world history. This was typical of a trend evident in many nation states in western Europe (Hobsbawm 1990: 108, Barkan 1992: 17).

The historical evidence surveyed here suggests that a conception of Englishness has been defined and developed since at least the mid-seventeenth century in order to construct a self-identity as well as to identify and exclude various Others. This specific instance of the imagination of nation has employed the idea of ‘race’, although the precise meaning of the idea has changed through time. But, irrespective of this changing meaning, the idea of ‘race’ has not been derivative or secondary, but an integral construct defining both the form and content of the attributed and real differentiation. This ideological project was grounded simultaneously in real political struggles which were central to the successful emergence of capitalism in England, and in the emerging pre-eminence of English merchant and industrial capital within the growing world economy.

There are reasons to agree with Naim’s claim that English nationalism is unusual because it was constructed in the absence of a need to mobilise a working class to force through a bourgeois revolution to establish the political preconditions for capitalist development. Thus (Naim 1981:43): ‘The result was a particularly powerful inter-class nationalism - a sense of underlying insular identity and common fate, which both recognised and yet easily transcended marked class and regional divisions.’ But, from the seventeenth century, that sense of ‘insular identity and common fate’ was additionally cemented by the idea of ‘race’ and, during the period of world dominance of English industrial capital, by the ideology of scientific racism. Indeed, it is because ‘stale, romantic, middle-class nationalism has survived on the surrogates of imperialism and foreign war for nearly a century’ (Naim 1981: 273) that racism occupies such a

central fissure in the edifice of Englishness: colonialism, imperialism, militarism and foreign war (including wars within Europe) have been widely explained and legitimated by the idea of the inevitable biological struggle for survival between discrete and hierarchical ‘races’. The idea of the English or British as an ‘imperial race’ was especially effective in the context of this history.

Hence, racism is not a new, centrally defining element of an English nationalism undergoing transformation to fit new economic and political circumstances in the late twentieth-century (Naim 1981:79-80,294), but is, rather, a long-established core element of English (and British) nationalism which has been reinterpreted and reconstructed in order to make it appropriate and meaningful in the post-colonial world. The definition of England in this nationalism is one in which ‘to be English is to be against necessary outsiders, a member of an occult secret society diffused throughout the merely legal collectivity of liberal democracy’ (Wright 1985: 125). But in the context of the declining fortunes of English capitalism, it has been brought forward to play a new role in a partially reconstituted form in order to identify a ‘new’ outsider who has allegedly slipped in through the back door, illicitly and with the connivance of various ‘traitors’.

RACISM AND NATIONALISM IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLAND

Since the early twentieth century, there have been major changes in the political and economic context within which the ideas of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ articulate and are made to do their work. Colonial empires that were once legitimated by racism have broken up. The nineteenth-century doctrine of scientific racism has been widely discredited (although not eliminated) by the consequences of the rise of fascism in Germany (Barkan 1992). These and other changes make the explicit expression of nineteenth-century forms of racism in the formal political arena difficult. This applies just as much to other European social formations as to England (see, for example, Taguieff 1990, Balibar and Wallerstein 1991). A number of writers have commented on this (e.g. Hall 1978, Seida! 1986). And Barker claimed in the early 1980s to have identified a ‘new racism’ which has superseded the ‘old racism’ (understood to refer to the scientific racism of the nineteenth century).

This supposedly novel ideological constellation dispenses with the notion of the world’s population being divided into ‘races’ in a hierarchy

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• f superiority and inferiority, and claims instead that it is natural for individuals to wish to form exclusive groups. Barker identifies the core of this ‘new racism’ as follows (1981: 21):
• is a theory of human nature. Human nature is such that it is natural to form a bounded community, a nation, aware of its differences from other nations. They are not better or worse. But feelings of antagonism will be aroused if outsiders are admitted. And there grows up a special form of connection between a nation and the place it lives.

Barker’s argument has been influential amongst writers in the Marxist tradition, and his conceptualisation of racism has been incorporated uncritically into a number of accounts of the current ideological and political crisis of British capitalism (e.g. CCCS 1982). While Barker’s thesis highlights certain central features of the changing conjuncture, it is not without its difficulties. My reservations about Barker’s thesis (see also Miles 1992) precede a discussion of the more recent articulation of racism and nationalism in England.

The notion of a ‘new racism’ presupposes an analysis of an ‘old racism’: what are the characteristics of the ‘old racism’ that have been (supposedly) discarded because they are not appropriate to the ‘New Times’? Barker is silent about the nature and origin of this ‘old racism’. Indeed, he seems to deny the existence of what might first be thought to be the ‘old racism’ when he claims, without adducing any evidence, that it is ‘a myth about the past that racism has generally been of the superiority/inferiority kind’ (1981:4). In the light of the vast quantity of historical evidence to which so many people have contributed (e.g. Montagu 1964, Gossett 1965, Stepan 1982, Gould 1984), one is tempted to conclude that this constitutes a rewriting of history which abolishes a whole chapter of European thought (not to mention racism in Europe). With this claim, Barker dispenses with over two hundred years or more of racist theorising without as much as a single citation to supporting evidence. And in the absence of a characterisation of the ‘old racism’, we have no adequate measure of what it is that is new about the ‘new racism’. Indeed, if there never was an ‘old racism’, Barker’s ‘new racism’ cannot be new.

Furthermore, Barker’s concept of racism is vague. It is poor philosophical logic to deny the validity of other definitions of racism while retaining the term as a key analytical category in the absence of a clear alternative explanation of what the concept refers to. The closest that Barker comes to providing an analytical content for his concept is in a claim that an assertion about the naturalness of xenophobia is a form of

racism because ‘it sees as biological, or pseudo-biological, groupings that are the result of social and historical processes’ (1981: 4). For Barker, therefore, a racist assertion appears to be one which incorrectly identifies any socio-historically constituted group as the product of biological determination. This is an extremely broad definition which, for example, offers no means of differentiating racism from either nationalism or sexism. Moreover, we are not offered any account of how or why this conceptualisation relates to or improves on other accounts.

Finally, the empirical object of Barker’s analysis is confined to the texts and speeches of leading members and supporters of the Conservative Party in Britain. This is a rather limited terrain upon which to erect a theory about the emergence of a ‘new racism’. It is a myopic conceptualisation because it leaves out of account a considerable range of ideological production. For example, analysis of National Front propaganda and other related literature published during the 1960s and 1970s demonstrates that the scientific racism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has remained central to the activities of neo-fascist political organisations (Billig 1978: 138-52). Moreover, members of neo-fascist organisations express a crude scientific racism which forms one of the linchpins of their political ideology (Billig 1978: 261-83): this ‘old racism’ therefore has a contemporary expression. Barker also ignores the imagery of the English working class, where more ‘classical’ forms of racist expression abound (e.g. Dummett 1973, Phizacklea and Miles 1979,1980).

Moreover, the significance of the political discourse of the leadership of the Conservative Party lies not only in its content but also in its object. The Party’s new leadership of the 1970s and the 1980s was engaged in a political mobilisation in a context where an ‘old racism’ was a significant ideological force but where there were strong pressures against its explicit reproduction within the formal political arena. The emergent right-wing leadership sought to legitimate and incorporate the racism which had been used to build political support for the National Front during the 1970s, but it was necessary to do so in a way which did not entail the articulation of the explicitly racist constructs voiced in the bus queue and the workplace (Reeves 1983: 172-203). Barker identified as the ‘new racism’ that part of the official discourse with which this was achieved, but he largely ignored the wider everyday discourses which created the possibility of such an incorporation.

An important dimension of the post-1945 period has been the way in which successive British governments have responded to political agitation to impose immigration controls on the entry of those who used

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to be called ‘coloured’ Commonwealth citizens (Miles and Phizacklea 1984). The political discourse employed has been overtly and covertly racist, although within the formal political arena, references to inherent biological inferiority to legitimate the demand for such exclusion have been rare. Rather, the migrants have been simultaneously racialised and signified as the cause of economic and social problems for ‘our own people’ (Miles 1984b, 1988a). Equally to the point, the actual legislation passed by successive governments draws in effect a distinction based on phenotypical difference as a basis for removing the right of entry and settlement of people who were previously entitled to do so. This entailed an institutionalisation of racism in the practice of the British state, and legitimated common-sense racism. Moreover, by removing the right of entry to, and settlement in, the United Kingdom from certain categories of British subject, the state established new (racist) criteria by which to determine membership of the 'imagined community’ of nation.

How, then, can one classify the dominant political discourse of the Conservative Party from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s? Barker describes that discourse as one which refers to ‘human nature’ to explain why people constitute ‘nations’ within a defined territory, within which a common way of life and a sense of national consciousness can be maintained. Furthermore, it is equally ‘human nature’ that members of this ‘imagined community’ should seek to exclude those with a different way of life and, therefore, with a ‘natural home’ elsewhere. This is an argument which, in part, closely resembles some of the classic claims of nineteenth-century nationalism. To redefine this nationalist argument simply as a ‘new racism’ requires a conceptual shift which results in a dissolution of any formal distinction between nationalism and racism. Indeed, Barker’s analysis is completely silent about the nature and origin of nationalism.

The centrality of nationalism to the Conservative Party’s creation of a populist unity (Hall 1983) was revealed in the political discourse of the Prime Minister during and after the Falklands War. During this short phase of political history, the ‘surrogates of imperialism and war’ (Nairn 1981: 273) were shown to have a continuing capacity to redefine and reinvigorate a sense of Englishness or Britishness. Indeed, the suggestion that another war could reinvigorate this defining characteristic of English/British nationalism was proven to be highly prophetic (Naim 1981: 274). The Prime Minister argued in July 1982 after the defeat of ‘the Argies’ by ‘our boys’ (cited in Barnett 1982: 150):

When we started out, there were the waverers and the fainthearts, the

people who thought that Britain could no longer seize the initiative for herself ... that Britain was no longer the nation that had built an Empire and ruled a quarter of the world. Well they were wrong. The lesson of the Falklands is that this nation still has those sterling qualities which shine through our history.

For Margaret Thatcher, the task was to sustain and redirect this positive sense of national identity, attained through military conflict, to reorganise civil society and correct economic decline. In other words, this was a speech which explicitly connected the contemporary with the past in order to identify a future project for an entity whose social identity was reconstructed as a result of an external threat. The burning hulk of the Sir Galahad was used to illuminate and simultaneously reconstruct the boundary of the imagined community of the English or British. ‘Great power’ nationalism flickered into life once more as some of ‘our boys’ participated in the ultimate sacrifice at the altar of nationalism.

But if nationalism more accurately describes a part of the political discourse of the Conservative Party analysed by Barker, what of racism? It has been argued that English nationalism is particularly dependent on and constructed by an idea of ‘race’, with the result that English nationalism encapsulates racism. In other words, racism is the lining of the cloak of nationalism which surrounds and helps define the boundaries of England as an imagined community. The obscured centrality of the idea of ‘race’ was revealed in the course of the emergency debate in the House of Commons on 3 April 1982 on the Falklands crisis. Margaret Thatcher drew upon the idea of ‘race’ in an attempt to sustain a sense of ‘nation’ (cited in Barnett 1982: 30):

The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race. Their way of life is British; their allegiance is to the Crown. They are few in number but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their way of life, and to determine their own allegiance. Their way of life is British; their allegiance is to the Crown.

And others heard and legitimated this stretching of the boundary of the imagined community of the British nation to include the people of the Falkland Islands. An editorial in The Times two days later included the claim (cited in Barnett 1982: 97): ‘We are an island race, and the focus of attack is one of our islands, inhabited by islanders.’

Thus, the idea of ‘race’ continues to articulate with the idea of ‘nation’ in order to define Englishness or Britishness. The echo of racism that

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arises from this articulation is evident in Thatcher’s positive reference to Britain’s history as an imperial power in the aforementioned speech: while the idea of the British as an ‘imperial race’ is no longer appropriate, the history of imperialism remains central to at least right-wing definitions of the British character. As Rushdie (1982) pointed out, British people of Caribbean and Asian origin are unlikely to have such a positive view of those ‘sterling qualities' of the English or British which the Empire was reputed to have revealed. Thus, the imagined community ‘revealed’ by the Falklands War was one which excluded ideologically those who had not been earlier excluded physically because they arrived before the passage of racist immigration laws. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher had herself defined this Caribbean and Asian presence as a threat to Englishness or Britishness. In 1978, she had suggested (cited in Miles and Phizacklea 1984: 5):

And, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law, and done so much throughout the world, that if there is a fear that it might be swamped, people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in.

The Conservative government reinforced this notion of Englishness or Britishness, which is shaped by the idea of ‘race’, in its British Nationality Act, 1981. The Act brought nationality law into line with the racist categories constructed in earlier immigration law and immigration rules (Dixon 1983: 173):

The crucial irony of the 1981 Act is that it is designed to define a sense of belonging and nationhood which is itself a manifestation of the sense of racial superiority created along with the Empire, while simultaneously it cuts the ties of citizenship established in the same historical process. The ideology of Empire is reconstructed: while Thatcherism rejects the essential expansionism of Empire in favour of ‘isolationism’, its supremacism, chauvinism and racism are preserved.

Thus, the ideas of ‘race’ and ‘nation’, as in a kaleidoscope, merge into one another in varying patterns, each simultaneously highlighting and obscuring the other.

The ideological articulation is neither a simple, mechanical reproduction of long-established ideas and images, nor homogeneous. Both nationalism and racism require a conscious and continuous reconstruction, in the course of which ‘old’ ideas are invested with ‘new’ meanings. ‘History’ has to be renegotiated and resignified in order to (re)create a sense of the past appropriate to the particular conjuncture and

the political project for the future. Traditions are invented to create a sense of historical continuity (Hobsbawm 1983: 2). This requires that events and material artefacts from the past are selected for attention and made relevant to the imagined present and future. In the case of English nationalism, the events selected include those which evince a sense of external threat over which ‘the English people’ triumph, especially events concerning war and imperialism (Wright 1985: 84, 179-80). The continually reconstructed sense of the English past, in which ‘race’ is an ever present reification, signifies the English ‘nation’ (and therefore the idea of ‘race’) as an ever present collective subject, defining the criteria of inclusion around the ability to sustain pride in bloodshed and colonial exploitation. But, in order that these reconstructions resonate, they must articulate with contemporary experience.

The centrality of racism to English nationalism is revealed once this is understood. The post-1945 Caribbean and Asian presence in Britain has been signified as a previously external threat that is now ‘within’, so that the ‘old order’ is threatened by its presence. As a result, because ‘our’ collective existence is supposedly challenged, resistance (even a new war) must be organised. The prominent and desirable features of ‘our culture’ are spotlighted and reified by the assertion that they are in danger of being negated by the consequences of the presence of an Other: what was once conceived of as eternal is resignified as transitory. As Wright puts it, ‘objects take on the aspect of heritage as they are endangered and the basic terms of their existence come into question’ (1985: 95), and this applies equally to cultural forms such as marriage norms which are supposed to be ‘threatened’ by ‘their alien ways’ (that is, the ‘arranged marriage’ system).

A testimony to the historical specificity of this articulation in the case of England is found by considering the example of Scotland. Here, nationalism has a specific historical and cultural content and became an influential political force during the 1960s and 1970s. Its articulation with racism is therefore, in part, also specific to the particular historical circumstances of Scotland. Individual Scots and Scottish companies were prominent in British colonial history (e.g. Smailes 1981, Cain 1986, Calder 1986) and there is evidence to suggest that this involvement in Empire played a part in sustaining the reproduction of racism in Scotland. But if this is so, it is paradoxical that the post-1945 Asian migrants to Scotland have not been the object of a systematic and hostile political agitation as happened in England (although this is not to deny that racist images of these migrants are commonly expressed in everyday life in Scotland).

Part of the explanation for this lies in the fact that the particular

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political compromise embodied in the Act of Union of 1707 between England and Scotland ensured the reproduction of a distinct proto-state apparatus and national identity. In this context, political nationalism in Scotland during the twentieth century has tended to focus on the perceived economic and political disadvantages of the Union. Nationalism in Scotland during the 1960s and 1970s therefore identified an external cause of economic disadvantage/decline, without reference to ‘race’, while in England the idea of ‘race’ was employed to identify an internal cause of crisis, the presence of a ‘coloured’ population which was not ‘truly’ British. Thus, in Scotland, the ‘national question’ has partially displaced (although not eliminated) the influence of racism in constructing the political agenda in this period, suggesting that racism is not as central to nationalism as in England (see Miles and Dunlop 1986,1987, Miles and Muirhead 1986, Miles 1987c).

CONCLUSION

The interrelationship between the ideologies of racism and nationalism is not, by definition, one of polar opposition. They have a common historical origin and formal characteristics which simultaneously overlap and contrast. Both claim the existence of a natural division of the world’s population into discrete groups which exist independently of class relations, although in the case of nationalism a culturalist definition of the boundary of the nation can be subordinated to a political definition. But the ideology of nationalism, unlike that of racism, specifies a particular political objective (national self-determination) and therefore a blueprint for political organisation on a world scale.

It may be true, as Anderson observes (1983: 129), that the cultural products of nationalism are often evaluated in positive emotional terms while those of racism are associated with negative emotions. There are times when a love/hate dichotomy does seem to mirror precisely a dichotomy between nationalism and racism. But such a simple dichotomy ignores much that requires explanation. The dialectic of inclusion and exclusion that is integral to the formation of imagined communities around the ideas of ‘nation’ and ‘race’ produces more complex patterns of identification and organisation than Anderson recognises: the idea of ‘race* can be employed to sustain a positive evaluation of a supraclass population. The self-identification of the English as a ‘race’ has a long history, in the course of which the notion of the English as an ‘imperial race' marked one particular moment. In this moment, Tove of nation’ entailed a Tove of race’.

Additionally, certain forms of fascist ideology which incorporate a racist theory of history have advanced a nationalist project which utilises an idea of ‘race’ to project a positive ‘historical destiny’ as well as ‘eternal contaminations’. This was clear in the case of German fascism, where a theory of ‘race’ was used first to define the criterion of positive inclusion. The imagined community of the German ‘nation’ was therefore identified by a positively evaluated signification of supposed ‘racial’ characteristics (Hayes 1973: 20-1, 37). In this instance, the idea of ‘race’ was not only an ‘eternal contamination’ grounded in negative emotion but was also used to generate a positive sense of a German ‘nation’. However, this boundary of inclusion was synchronically a boundary of exclusion which identified an Other who did not and could not belong to the imagined community and which prepared for its physical extermination (Fleming 1986). Indeed, the ‘race’ category and the ideology of racism can be ideal vehicles for positive assertions about historical destiny because they are often grounded in arguments about alleged biological determinism: nothing sustains an idea of historical certainty better than a reference to biology.

Thus, while there is a place for theoretical reflection (e.g. Balibar 1988c), an assessment of the interrelation between racism and nationalism is also dependent upon the historical analysis of specific examples of articulation. The example I have pursued demonstrates that the parameters of an imagined community of nation can be specified and legitimated by racism. In other words, the ideologies of racism and nationalism can be interdependent and overlapping, the idea of ‘race’ serving as a criterion of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion so that the boundary of the imagined ‘nation’ is equally a boundary of ‘race’. In the case of English nationalism, given its historical genesis, this means that racism is one of its core components.