As we await the likely success of xenophobic parties in next year’s European elections, Francisco Bethencourt’s Racisms could not be more timely. A notable feature of today’s far right is their blunt denial of any association with the “scientific racism” of the Nazis; their concerns, they insist, are not with notions of biological difference, but with culture. The fear is not of “contamination” by inferior “blood-lines” but of domination by “alien” cultural values and practices—especially those of Islam. Bethencourt, a professor of history at King’s College London, has no time for such distinctions. Racism, he argues, predates the scientific theories of the 19th and 20th centuries, which, in any case, always owed more to cultural stereotypes than to science. Many of these prejudices, he argues, originated in the crusades and the oceanic explorations of the Renaissance.
But while ideas of race may have long lineages, they do not inevitably become politically significant; for just as persistent as ideas of cultural difference, are beliefs in similarity and cultural unity. Ideologies of racial and cultural threat only become important at certain moments—usually when previously secure social groups fear loss of status to those they see as different. Even more crucial is the willingness of political leaders to pander to these fears with discriminatory policies. It is clear that we are living through one of these moments in Europe right now, as many members of the white working classes feel abandoned by our political and economic systems, and focus their resentment on migrants. Bethencourt’s incisive analysis ought to be compulsory reading in the think tanks, chanceries and ministries of the developed world.
But while ideas of race may have long lineages, they do not inevitably become politically significant; for just as persistent as ideas of cultural difference, are beliefs in similarity and cultural unity. Ideologies of racial and cultural threat only become important at certain moments—usually when previously secure social groups fear loss of status to those they see as different. Even more crucial is the willingness of political leaders to pander to these fears with discriminatory policies. It is clear that we are living through one of these moments in Europe right now, as many members of the white working classes feel abandoned by our political and economic systems, and focus their resentment on migrants. Bethencourt’s incisive analysis ought to be compulsory reading in the think tanks, chanceries and ministries of the developed world.
