<nettime> The Twilight of the Anglosaxon Model (by Brett Neilson)
Via: Ned Rossiter
via: < B.Neilson@uws.edu.au>
The following is an English language version (slightly longer) of an
article published in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto yesterday.
http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/28-Dicembre-2005/
art82.html
Thanks to Ange, Ben and others who helped me shape these observations.
The Twilight of the Anglosaxon Model
by Brett Neilson
There are those who declared, at the height of the revolts in the
French banlieues, that the time had come to recognise that the
Anglosaxon model of multiculturalism has delivered greater peace and
stability than the French model of republican integrationalism. By
now, the course of events has overtaken such proclamations. For
anyone with doubts, the violence that occurred at Sydney's Cronulla
Beach earlier this month must shatter the illusion that communitarian
models of racial tolerance have been more effective than
integrationalist logics in reconciling the complexities of life in
diverse societies with the identitarian demands of the modern nation-
state. The situations in Paris and Sydney have to do with a wider
global conflict that has levelled the distinction between the civil
and the foreign war and insinuated itself in the daily rituals of
metropolitan life.
Symbol of the affinities between the conflicts in these cities is the
detritus that both have left behind: suburban streets lined with cars
burned or smashed to pieces with baseball bats. For those who have
not followed the events in Australia, these were acts of Middle
Eastern youth following the pogrom perpetrated against them by a
crowd of 5,000 angry whites gathered at Cronulla Beach, a popular
seaside resort in the city's southeast. Part of the Sutherland Shire,
one of the whitest and racially homogeneous areas of Sydney,
Cronulla, unlike other city beaches, is served by the railroad,
making it for many years a popular picnic destination for Lebanese
and other Mediterranean families that live predominantly in the
city's west. In more recent times, with the construction of bridges
and freeways that make car travel from the Western suburbs more
feasible, it has also become a gathering spot for young Arabs who
cruise the city in modified cars, listen to U.S. gangsta rap, and
engage in occasional scuffles with the white surfers who claim the
beach as their own. To be sure, this racial violence has acquired a
sexual dynamic, partly as a result of a gang rape that became a cause
celebre of tabloid racism and amplified the fiction that Muslim men
harass white women more than their Anglo counterparts. Thus, it is no
surprise that the white backlash rally of 11 December, organised by
SMS that were subsequently read out on talk radio and published in
the mainstream press, should announce itself as a defense of white
women, even as its ostensible cause was a fight between Lebanese
youth and two off-duty lifeguards. What occurred that Sunday
afternoon will go down as a heavy chapter in Australia's racial
history: white youths draped in Australian flags, tearing the veil
from Muslim women and pulverising the male 'lebs' and 'wogs' who
happened to get in their way.
While the images from this event were quickly relayed around the
world, the local response was an official attempt to talk down the
racial dimensions of the rampage and the passage of emergency laws
granting police powers to 'lockdown' suburbs and randomly search
cars. The following weekend, the beaches of Sydney were heavily
patrolled and accessible only to residents of the beachside suburbs,
a situation long desired by the racist elements who orchestrated and
participated in the progrom. Importantly, the beach has long provided
the ground for egalitarian fantasies of public access in Australia,
not least among the white intellectual classes. But it is also the
space where the otherly complexioned are apt to feel the least
comfortable.
It is worthwhile to remember that the Australian coastline is legally
designated as Crown land, a peculiar juridical category of the
settler colonies that at once extinguishes Indigenous territorial
claims and grants the sovereign the right to control private rights
and interests over landed property. In this sense, the presence of
the Union Jack on the national flag brandished by the white ramapgers
demonstrates that their claim on the beach was not a result of some
neo-Nazi infiltration but precisely an action in the name of the
public or the sovereignty of the people, the very basis of Australian
democratic expression. Perhaps this is why the New South Wales
Commissioner of Police could describe the rampage as 'a legitimate
protest and expression of disatisfaction.' And perhaps this also
explains why conservatives from the Prime Minister and Leader of the
Oppostion down have scrupuously disavowed the racial dynamic that
fueled the violence.
To be sure, there are dangers in assuming a stance that denounces the
racism of the Cronulla rampagers as vulgar and unbefitting of a
nation that prides itself on its multiculturalism. Such a position
seeks merely to absolve the national elites from responsibility in
the situation, indirectly justifying the populist claim that it is
not their business to interfere with expressions of the people. It
also fails to ponder the complexities of multicultural tolerance, not
least the way in which it leaves unchecked the capacity of those with
social power to act intolerantly. By the same token, it is dangerous,
given the public disavowal of the episode's racial aspects, to skirt
or complicate the question of race too much. Certainly, it is
necessary to point to the sexual dynamics that fuel this and, as we
know from Fanon, all other instances of racial violence. Equally, it
is crucial to understand the elements of social class, the history of
beach subcultures, mateship, or the participation of white women in
this anti-Muslim rampage. But to draw the discussion away from race
is to risk foreclosing an analysis of how the Australian model of
multiculturalism, particularly in the context of global war, fails to
deactivate the confluence of racial and nationalist feelings that
culminates in episodes like Cronulla.
It is a well-known paradox of Australian multiculturalism that it is
the same government department that organises events such as Harmony
Day in schools that is responsible for the administration of the
nation's notorious migration detention camps. Under the current war
conditions (Australia has been a willing participant in both
Afghanistan and Iraq), the presence of internal Muslim communities,
particularly those who refuse, often with stridency, to accept their
proletarianisation or crimilisation through racist law and order
agendas, has posed a consistent problem for the white political
classes. Indeed, in the wake of Cronulla, the local conservative
member of parliament went as far as to characterise the rampage as
revenge for the 911 attacks and the Bali bombings. While Morris
Iemma, the recently appointed Premier of New South Wales, wasted no
time in describing the police response as a war.
More frightening is the rapidity with which the state of seige has
been normalised, at once pushing Muslim and ethnic groups away from
the beaches while, for the sake of seaside businesses, compelling
Sydney-siders to return to their usual patterns of summer
consumption. As we know from cities like Sarajevo, it is often in
contexts where the intimacy between cultural groups has been
strongest that racial violence assumes its most shocking and
vivisectionist forms. For this reason, it is safest not to assume
that the thick cultural mixing that one finds in parts of Sydney
provides any guarantee against the escalation of the situation. What
the city faces now is nothing less than civil war, one which, like
the foreign wars we see (or rather don't see) nightly on our
television screens, all too quickly become part of metropolitan life.
It is likely, under the current global conditions, that these urban
conflagrations will not limit themselves to Paris and Sydney, but
flare up with increasing frequency here and there around the globe.
Who knows, Rome or Milan may be next.
via: < B.Neilson@uws.edu.au>
The following is an English language version (slightly longer) of an
article published in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto yesterday.
http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/28-Dicembre-2005/
art82.html
Thanks to Ange, Ben and others who helped me shape these observations.
The Twilight of the Anglosaxon Model
by Brett Neilson
There are those who declared, at the height of the revolts in the
French banlieues, that the time had come to recognise that the
Anglosaxon model of multiculturalism has delivered greater peace and
stability than the French model of republican integrationalism. By
now, the course of events has overtaken such proclamations. For
anyone with doubts, the violence that occurred at Sydney's Cronulla
Beach earlier this month must shatter the illusion that communitarian
models of racial tolerance have been more effective than
integrationalist logics in reconciling the complexities of life in
diverse societies with the identitarian demands of the modern nation-
state. The situations in Paris and Sydney have to do with a wider
global conflict that has levelled the distinction between the civil
and the foreign war and insinuated itself in the daily rituals of
metropolitan life.
Symbol of the affinities between the conflicts in these cities is the
detritus that both have left behind: suburban streets lined with cars
burned or smashed to pieces with baseball bats. For those who have
not followed the events in Australia, these were acts of Middle
Eastern youth following the pogrom perpetrated against them by a
crowd of 5,000 angry whites gathered at Cronulla Beach, a popular
seaside resort in the city's southeast. Part of the Sutherland Shire,
one of the whitest and racially homogeneous areas of Sydney,
Cronulla, unlike other city beaches, is served by the railroad,
making it for many years a popular picnic destination for Lebanese
and other Mediterranean families that live predominantly in the
city's west. In more recent times, with the construction of bridges
and freeways that make car travel from the Western suburbs more
feasible, it has also become a gathering spot for young Arabs who
cruise the city in modified cars, listen to U.S. gangsta rap, and
engage in occasional scuffles with the white surfers who claim the
beach as their own. To be sure, this racial violence has acquired a
sexual dynamic, partly as a result of a gang rape that became a cause
celebre of tabloid racism and amplified the fiction that Muslim men
harass white women more than their Anglo counterparts. Thus, it is no
surprise that the white backlash rally of 11 December, organised by
SMS that were subsequently read out on talk radio and published in
the mainstream press, should announce itself as a defense of white
women, even as its ostensible cause was a fight between Lebanese
youth and two off-duty lifeguards. What occurred that Sunday
afternoon will go down as a heavy chapter in Australia's racial
history: white youths draped in Australian flags, tearing the veil
from Muslim women and pulverising the male 'lebs' and 'wogs' who
happened to get in their way.
While the images from this event were quickly relayed around the
world, the local response was an official attempt to talk down the
racial dimensions of the rampage and the passage of emergency laws
granting police powers to 'lockdown' suburbs and randomly search
cars. The following weekend, the beaches of Sydney were heavily
patrolled and accessible only to residents of the beachside suburbs,
a situation long desired by the racist elements who orchestrated and
participated in the progrom. Importantly, the beach has long provided
the ground for egalitarian fantasies of public access in Australia,
not least among the white intellectual classes. But it is also the
space where the otherly complexioned are apt to feel the least
comfortable.
It is worthwhile to remember that the Australian coastline is legally
designated as Crown land, a peculiar juridical category of the
settler colonies that at once extinguishes Indigenous territorial
claims and grants the sovereign the right to control private rights
and interests over landed property. In this sense, the presence of
the Union Jack on the national flag brandished by the white ramapgers
demonstrates that their claim on the beach was not a result of some
neo-Nazi infiltration but precisely an action in the name of the
public or the sovereignty of the people, the very basis of Australian
democratic expression. Perhaps this is why the New South Wales
Commissioner of Police could describe the rampage as 'a legitimate
protest and expression of disatisfaction.' And perhaps this also
explains why conservatives from the Prime Minister and Leader of the
Oppostion down have scrupuously disavowed the racial dynamic that
fueled the violence.
To be sure, there are dangers in assuming a stance that denounces the
racism of the Cronulla rampagers as vulgar and unbefitting of a
nation that prides itself on its multiculturalism. Such a position
seeks merely to absolve the national elites from responsibility in
the situation, indirectly justifying the populist claim that it is
not their business to interfere with expressions of the people. It
also fails to ponder the complexities of multicultural tolerance, not
least the way in which it leaves unchecked the capacity of those with
social power to act intolerantly. By the same token, it is dangerous,
given the public disavowal of the episode's racial aspects, to skirt
or complicate the question of race too much. Certainly, it is
necessary to point to the sexual dynamics that fuel this and, as we
know from Fanon, all other instances of racial violence. Equally, it
is crucial to understand the elements of social class, the history of
beach subcultures, mateship, or the participation of white women in
this anti-Muslim rampage. But to draw the discussion away from race
is to risk foreclosing an analysis of how the Australian model of
multiculturalism, particularly in the context of global war, fails to
deactivate the confluence of racial and nationalist feelings that
culminates in episodes like Cronulla.
It is a well-known paradox of Australian multiculturalism that it is
the same government department that organises events such as Harmony
Day in schools that is responsible for the administration of the
nation's notorious migration detention camps. Under the current war
conditions (Australia has been a willing participant in both
Afghanistan and Iraq), the presence of internal Muslim communities,
particularly those who refuse, often with stridency, to accept their
proletarianisation or crimilisation through racist law and order
agendas, has posed a consistent problem for the white political
classes. Indeed, in the wake of Cronulla, the local conservative
member of parliament went as far as to characterise the rampage as
revenge for the 911 attacks and the Bali bombings. While Morris
Iemma, the recently appointed Premier of New South Wales, wasted no
time in describing the police response as a war.
More frightening is the rapidity with which the state of seige has
been normalised, at once pushing Muslim and ethnic groups away from
the beaches while, for the sake of seaside businesses, compelling
Sydney-siders to return to their usual patterns of summer
consumption. As we know from cities like Sarajevo, it is often in
contexts where the intimacy between cultural groups has been
strongest that racial violence assumes its most shocking and
vivisectionist forms. For this reason, it is safest not to assume
that the thick cultural mixing that one finds in parts of Sydney
provides any guarantee against the escalation of the situation. What
the city faces now is nothing less than civil war, one which, like
the foreign wars we see (or rather don't see) nightly on our
television screens, all too quickly become part of metropolitan life.
It is likely, under the current global conditions, that these urban
conflagrations will not limit themselves to Paris and Sydney, but
flare up with increasing frequency here and there around the globe.
Who knows, Rome or Milan may be next.
comments
No new comments allowed (anymore) on this post.