8/8/2019 Hall S - Europe's Other Self

1/2

Europe'sOther Self

The history of Europe is not onlyinternal, but external: its relation

with its Others. Stuart Hall examinesthe impact of fundamentalism and

Third World migration on Europeanidentity

We are advancing steadilytowards two anniversary

occasions for Europe. Thecountdown has alreadybegun to 1992, the birthday of the newEurope. Despite the rearguard action ofthe Thatcherite rump, the supra-national shape of the new Europe isbeginning to emerge. This occasion willbe inward-looking - the lowering ofeconomic and trading barriers, theopening of convergence and integrationwhich everyone hopes will bring pros-perity to western European peoples.Here, it is the waning of the era of theseparate nation-states, which have forso long provided the engine of Europeangrowth. Once again, Europe is able to

produce from within her own bordersand resources, both material and spirit-ual, the conditions for the next phase ofsocial development. This has been thedominant narrative of modernity forsome time - an 'internalist' story, withcapitalism growing from the womb offeudalism and Europe's self-generatingcapacity to produce, like a silk-worm,the circumstances of her own evolutionfrom within her own body.The other anniversary marks another,

equally important, but less frequentlycelebrated aspect. 1992 is also the500th anniversary of Christopher Col-

umbus's so-called 'discovery' of the NewWorld. This event, along with the Portu-guese opening-up of the African coast-line and advance (with the assistance ofArab traders who had long plied thosewaters) into the Indian Ocean andbeyond, marked the opening of the eraof European expansion - the process ofexploration, conquest and colonisationby which virtually the whole globe washarnessed in one way or another toEurope. 'Globalisation', which we oftenspeak of as if it began with the 'BigBang', and the computerisation of theStock Exchange, really started therewith Columbus's 'mistake', and has

been going on ever since. (He was reallyon the way somewhere else and re-mained stubbornly convinced, when hehit the New World, that, like any other

good European businessman, he had ar-rived in Japan.)

Europe's external relations with itsOthers has been central to the Europeanstory since its inception, and remainsso. The story of European identity isoften told as if it had no exterior. Butthis tells us more about how culturalidentities are constructed - as 'ima-gined communities', through the mark-ing of difference with others - than itdoes about the actual relations ofunequal exchange and uneven develop-ment through which a common Euro-pean identity was forged. Now that anew Europe is taking shape, the samecontradictory process of marking sym-bolic boundaries and constructing sym-

bolic frontiers between inside and out-side, interior and exterior, belongingand otherness, is providing a silentaccompaniment to the march to 1992.

One of the key sites of this discursivework is, of course, eastern Europe - aboundary which has always given west-ern Europe trouble. Westwards, whatused to be called 'the Green Sea ofDarkness' provided a natural boundary.But eastwards, the continent refuses toend naturally. It stretches out to theUrals and beyond, into the dark unk-nown from which the barbarians de-scended. Where does Europe stop and

Asia begin? The question is critical -European prosperity depends on find-ing an answer to it. In the negotiationsbetween European capitalism and thedisintegrating communist empires ofeastern Europe - the Second World -we are about to discover the answer.

Currently, the line is staked out interms of the contrast between the'international' West and the 'national-ist' East. As national boundaries areweakened and eroded in western Eur-ope, we are told, so in eastern Europethere is a resurgence of nationalism.The contrast between the 'rational' and

civilised West and the irrational andbarbarous East underpins this opposi-tion. Of course, many of the national-isms which are helping to fragment theold communist empire are driven by

ethnic absolutism, hatred of difference,racial exclusiveness and religious ortho-doxy. But it ill behoves western Europeto complain. Its own development oc-curred on the back of nationalismswhich also had their own racially andethnically exclusive character. It is nota surprise that the Croatians, theSlovenes, the Latvians, the Estonians,etc, should regard the construction of alittle nation of their own as a passport to

the West. These emergent nationalismsare not simply revivals of the past butreworkings of it in the circumstances ofthe present - entry tickets to the newEurope. Though they look like a returnto a pre-1914 historical agenda, they arefunctioning as a way of evading the pastand making a bid for modernity (ie,entry to the Euro-club).

A s E u ro p e c o n s o l id a te s a n d c o n v e rg e s , s o asimilar exercise in boundary mainten-ance is in progress with respect to itsThird World 'Others'. Currently, the twofavourite discursive markers in this

discourse are 'refugees' and 'funda-mentalism'. The question of illegal im-migration has once again surfaced as anurgent topic of European discussion,the redoubtable French Socialist primeminister, Edith Cresson, regretting that'of every ten immigrants found to behere illegally, only three are expelled',and Jacques Chirac, that model of thenew European cosmopolitan enlighten-ment, remarking on the 'noise andsmell' of foreigners which drove decentFrench people 'understandably crazy'.Douglas Hurd and Kenneth Baker havebeen spinning complicated webs aroundthe distinction between 'political refu-

gees' and 'economic migrants'. Politicalrefugees deserve refuge in enlightenedEurope, home of liberty. Usually theyare few in number, and it is often hardto prove conclusively that they are indirect danger from some oppressive ortyrannical regime of the kind whichpoverty and indebtedness breeds -which allows a reasonable proportion tobe bundled unceremoniously back tothe waiting arms of the local police.

conomic migrants, on theother hand, are simply the un-witting casualties of the 'nor-mal' processes of market

forces as they operate at the periphery.Europe, whose banking arrangementshave destroyed subsistence agricultureand whose new Gatt arrangements willprice most of them out of the commod-ity markets, owes them nothing. It istrue that, Tebbit-like, they got on theirbikes (or the nearest equivalent - aone-way charter flight ticket) and,quite rationally, went to seek theirfortunes in the only place where for-tunes are to be made. But this will neverdo. Suddenly, European prosperity is astrictly European affair, designedexclusively for what every self-

respecting Euro-politician is calling'our populations'. No wonder, when theBerlin Wall collapsed, every self-respecting Pole and East German whohad a Lada capable of making the jour-

E

18 MARXISM TODAY AUGUST 1991

8/8/2019 Hall S - Europe's Other Self

2/2

ney climbed aboard, and like Columbusin search of pure gold, headed west. Thefrontiers are closing...The problem is (as Colin Prescod's

excellent BBC2 series, Black On Eur-ope, about the plight of western Eur-ope's ethnic minorities, has been show-ing) the 'barbarians' are already insidethe gate; and face-to-face with them,European cosmopolitanism does notstand up well to the test. Millions of

Muslims in France, Sudanese and Ethio-pians in Italy, Turks and Africans inGermany, Portugal, Spain, Asians andAfro-Caribbeans in Britain, Indone-sians and Surinamese in Holland, bearwitness, not only to the actual mechan-isms of 'globalisation' but to the diffi-culty of sloughing off in one easy move-ment Europe's long colonial past orkeeping the periphery in place.

The so-called 'homogeneouspopulations' of the new Eu-rope - the ethnic absolutismon which the new 'openness'

is being constructed - has always been,

at best, an elaborate metaphor. As Daf-fyd Ellis Thomas, the Plaid Cymru MP,recently pointed out, no single westernEuropean state corresponds to onepeople. The Slovenes, like the Scots, theWelsh and the Basques, may hope tobring into existence a nation which is astate - that is, a state which is theexpression of a homogeneous ethnicgroup. But all the major European nat-ions are already hybridised - multicul-tural. And now this is compounded bythe most astonishing aspect of 'global-isation' - the tidal wave of migrationswhich it has stimulated. Peoples, drawninexorably through the laws of uneven

development into the networks of a glo-balised world system, and long accus-tomed to dwell simultaneously in the'local' worlds of traditional societiesand the 'global' worlds of internationalcapital, have simply packed their fewbelongings and set out - legally or il-legally - to cross those visible andinvisible frontiers designed to keepthem immured in the 'backwardness' oftheir ethnic particularisms, in search ofthe far side of Paradise. Every majorEuropean and North American citytoday is a multi-cultural metropolis.

The category of 'fundamentalism', revivedwith new vigour somewhere betweenthe Rushdie affair and the Gulf war, isthe latest mechanism whose frontiereffect is designed to keep the migrat-ing millions on the other side of thefence. It collapses the extraordinarydiversity and proliferation of differ-ence which is the law of globalisationinto the simplifying oppositions ofWestern rationalism, modernity andliberal tolerance of one side, versus theretreat into the irrationalism of ethnicand religious particularism. Would thatliberalism and fundamentalism were so

easy to distribute into their respectivespaces. Of course, there are 'fundamen-talist' regimes in the world; and theirretreat into racial purity, religious or-thodoxy and a rigid cultural traditional-

ism has done nothing for the millions ofpoor people languishing under theirrule. The view, held by some westernradicals, that because these regimes(sometimes) oppose the West we shouldsupport them, is a profound error,forced on us by the fact that we con-tinue to work with these simple binaryoppositions. We might call this, follow-ing Marx's remark about anti-semitism,not 'the socialism', but the 'anti-

imperialism of fools'. There was a lot ofit about during the Gulf war on thedubious grounds that, because SaddamHussein was 'bad news' for Washington,he must be somehow 'good news' for theIraqis. Whereas, what poor people in theThird World need, against the oli-garchic regimes which have often risento power with the aid of western govern-ments and arms merchants, is more, notless democracy - just like us.As a concept designed to help us under-

stand the rapidly shifting relations bet-ween the different 'worlds', fundamen-talism is virtually useless. Islam, theprincipal culprit in this fundamentalistdiscourse, is an immensely diverse setof peoples, beliefs, traditions and prac-tices. What it shares with Christianity ismore extensive than that between anyother world religion. It may be the factthat they are so close which makes themsuch implacable enemies - think of theway Christian, Jewish and Islamic theo-logical history converges on Jerusalem.'Fundamentalism' as a term is a way ofsuppressing this diversity, forgetting ashared history too involuted to submitto simplifying slogans, of refusing tolive with difference. In fact, Muslimresponses to the Ayatollah's fatwa

against Salman Rushdie were muchmore varied than has been recognised;and they had as much to do with thelocal contexts and historical conjunc-tures in which they were expressed asthe 'essential fundamentalism' theywere taken to represent.

If what we mean by 'fundamenta-lism' is a defensive and exclusiveretreat into a rigid and unchang-ing version of the past inhabited

as Truth, then there is plenty of itabout, not least in the so-called 'modernWest'. The attempt to shore up themarket-driven destruction of the social

fabric of British society during theThatcher years by an appeal to Victo-rian values, the evocation of BritanniaResurgent in the Falklands war, theThatcher-Tebbit test of 'are you one ofus?', the stout defence of 'Englishness'which is being inscribed by diktatthrough the National Curriculum inschools, the backlash, both here andwith much greater vigour and venom inthe US, against 'multiculturalism' -these are but a few of the outward andmanifest signs that a kind of fundamen-talism is alive and well at the centre of'modernity'. Some would argue that ithas stood at the side of modernity - theEnlightenment's 'dark shadow' - fromits inception.

In fact, 'globalisation' (which carriesthe ring of modernity and cosmopoli-

'Where doesEurope stop

and Asiabegin? Thequestion is

critical -Europeanprosperitydepends onfinding the

answer to it'

tanism about it) and 'fundamentalism'are not opposites but complementary;two sides of the same coin. As the newforms of globalisation unhinge thenegotiated compromises between tradi-tion and modernity in the Third World,the process calls into being in responsea vigourous 'localism'. Localism can bepurely defensive - inward-turning,exclusive, absolutist, a retreat into anenclave form of ethnicity. But there are

many 'ethnicities', just as there aremany types of nationalism, not all ofthem harnessed irreversibly to a reac-tionary politics, as over-rationalist ver-sions of both liberalism and marxismonce claimed. The construction of alter-native local histories and cultures canbe a resource for building the future,not just a return to the 'safe haven' ofthe past: an invention rather thansimply a rediscovery of tradition, whichprovides marginalised people with thecultural means to construct those newidentities and counter-narratives with-out which they cannot survive, let alonecontest and negotiate with the West onanything approaching equal terms.

This is why, paradoxically, in the era ofglobalisation, the margins, the periph-ery, the 'local', has time and again provedto be culturally the most productivespace. Face to face with the contradic-tory realities of 'globalisation', every-body is discovering their ethnicity: notthe purity of their origins, which in amigrating world is impossible to dis-cover, but simply the fact that theycome from particular places, speak par-ticular languages, inhabit distinctivecultural traditions, belong to particularlandscapes and share with many others

who are not 'the same' as them, particu-lar histories. In short, living with,rather than simply forgetting, 'differ-ence'. This is preferable to the endlessforgetting - the historical amnesia -coupled with a vapid postmodernnostalgia which is globalisation's stock-in-trade.

Identity is always an open, complexand unfinished game - always 'underconstruction' (in Europe as much as inthe Middle East, Africa or the Carib-bean). It always moves into the futureby a symbolic detour through the past.It produces new subjects. But they al-

ways bear the indelible traces of thosespecific histories, traditions and cul-tures through which identities formthemselves - produce themselvesanew. The people of the periphery haveno other cultural resources with whichto defend themselves against the homo-genising 'indifference' of globalisation,no other languages in which to define adifferent, more vernacular, set ofmodernities for themselves. In thissense, the rise of ethnicity (only somevariants of which are 'fundamentalist')is one of the products of 'globalisation'

- the most subversive of its many unin-

tended consequences.

Stuart Hall is professor of sociology atthe Open University.

19 MARXISM TODAY AUGUST 1991