Introduction
Although in the past decades the study of international relations has become much
more sensitive to questions of culture, identity and movement, racism has remained an
undertheorized area. This absence has become much more striking in the 1990s
because of the renewed interest in migration and other intercultural exchanges as
“security threats”, as well the emergence of nationalism and putatively ‘ethnic’
conflict as a central basis of strife in the post-cold war era. This article is an
attempt to discuss new forms of racism in international relations with particular
reference to American international politics during the second Gulf War. Drawing
from the work of Etienne Balibar, we argue that a contemporary neo-racism, which is
devoid of races, is present in international relations simultaneously as a problem of
knowledge and as a problem of political practice. Our aim is to contribute to the
strategic movement of international relations theory from a conception of cultural
encounters as “threats” to international order and security towards a critique of neoracism as a continuous source of conflict.
The Bounds of Race in International Relations: Redux
Rework this section:
 Doty has argued the difficulty of discussing race in IR is related to the
challenge of definition
o the question of a non-static term in a positivist field
o discussing race without ‘racializing’
 this is true, but does not allow for a historically-materially constructed
understanding of the function of race
o race and racism are material and historically constructed
 Balibar on race-nation-class, Anthias & Yuval-Davis

IR is an ‘expert knowledge’ implicated in contemporary construction of the
understanding and study of race (since WWII, the diminishing permissibility
of ‘scientific’ racism)
o The ‘domestification’ of race
o Civic nationalism ostensibly resolves race within liberal democracies
 Redefinition / replace ethnic nationalism
 Though this is a false construct: civic nationalism still contains
race, and does not replace ethnic nationalism everywhere
o (a)historicizes race in the international
The significance of race for IR should not be in doubt: the discourses of the expansion
of the European Empires that led to the ‘globalization’ of the states system were
conspicuously racialised. The international law that emerged during the period of
colonial expansion, involving notions such as ‘extra-territoriality’ (which applied to
‘counties where international rivalry excluded the introduction of direct or indirect
colonial rule’) – exempting Western subjects from the laws of formally sovereign
non-Western states – included racialized ‘standards of civilisation’ to justify their
double-standards (Tinker 1977: 8). Such discourses continued through the emergence
of the modern state system outside of Europe. The aftermath of World War I, for
example, established both the norm of self-determination and, in the form of the
Mandate System, the racialised limits of that norm: where the hierarchy constructed
by its standard of civilization corresponded to the colonial race hierarchy (Louis
1985). At this time the international character of racial hierarchies was an explicit
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1
issue for discussion in the diplomatic arena, as Japan unsuccessfully fought to have
racial equality included as a founding principle in the League of Nations. Racialized
discourses in international politics continued after that, as has been well documented.
R.J. Vincent reminds us: ‘It was, after all, well into this century, and not at the height
of Victorian imperial enthusiasm, that Franklin Roosevelt put forward schemes for the
inter-breeding of European and Asian stock to produce a less delinquent Asian race,
and Churchill thought in terms of ‘baboos’, ‘chinks’ and ‘Hottentots’’ (Vincent 1982:
666). The conduct and resolution of World War II evidenced racialized
understandings of the ‘enemy’ among the Allies, which would go on to construct the
international organizations of the contemporary order. In the early post-war period,
race and the politics of decolonisation significantly informed the politics of
international institutions and the nature of cold war rivalry.
Anti-colonial struggles appeared to resolve the issue of race in International Relations
in grounding their claims in existing norms of the states system: the norms of selfdetermination and sovereignty. Self-determination addressed the anti-colonial
principle of, as Ali Mazuri puts it, ‘rulers manifestly belonging to the same race as the
ruled’, while sovereignty guaranteed the formal equality of political communities and
the right to non-interference from external powers (Vincent 1982: 664). This may
have been reinforced by the construction of racism and ‘race relations’ as objects of
sociological study within industrialised countries in the post-WWII era, i.e., as
questions that likewise predominantly took the boundary of the ‘nation’-state as
parameters. Nevertheless, this does not provide sufficient explanation for how a
discourse as conspicuous as race became removed from the study of International
Relations.1
Race does have historically and socially specific articulations. The difficulty of
defining the shifting concept of race contributes to the challenge of studying it.
However, the process of ‘racialisation’ does not conform to the boundaries of the
state.2 Quite paradoxically, given IR’s norm to silence race, many of the social fields
through which race has been defined and racial codes have been articulated – nation,
culture/civilization, ethnicity – are equally those by which international relations
constitute its own boundaries and categories of analysis.

Race/racism is implicated in the constitution of ‘national’ political community,
even in liberal democratic states that ostensibly deny identity as a basis for the
polis.3 It is central to the ‘fictive ethnicity’ around which nationalism is
1
There are very few studies in the field; the most explicit engagements with the question are: Hugh
Tinker, Race, Conflict and the International Order (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977), R. J. Vincent,
'Race in International Relations', International Affairs, 58/4 (1982), 658-70; Roxanne Lynn Doty, 'The
Bounds of 'Race' in International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 22/3 (1993),
443-62; Frank Füredi, The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race (Lonton:
Pluto Press, 1998); Robert Vitalis, 'The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism
Invisible in American International Relations', Millennium, 29/2 (2000), 331-56; Gerald Horne, 'Race
from Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and the General Crisis of "White Supremacy"', Diplomatic History,
23/3 (1999), 437-61.
2
It seems then that one is faced with the impossible task of providing a sense of what is meant when
one speaks of race and at the same time eschewing definitions of race that bear any resemblance to
scientific racism. Doty
3
On the relation between racism and nationalism, Balibar specifies several models of conceptualizing
the expression or manifestation of racism – theoretical (doctrinal) versus ‘spontaneous’ racism, internal
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2

organized.4 As Balibar observes, nationalism contains strong tensions within,
between its quasi-‘universalist’ aspirations to unite heterogeneous individuals
in a common identity (a cultural or ethnic supplement to territorial control)
and the particularist ideal type around which such an identity is constructed.
Racism contributes to this tension, a latent potential of the particularist
dimension whose expression always threatens the universalist aspirations.5
Nationalism contains racism as an internal supplement, ‘always in excess of it
but always indispensable to its constitution and yet always still insufficient to
achieve its project’.6 The notion of citizenship in ‘modern, egalitarian’
societies is not beyond such logics, it is precisely in these countries that
‘officially’ disregard differences between individuals that race hierarchies
develop.7
The construction of race hierarchies / racism in association with modern
nationalisms contains a strong class component. Myths of the ‘nation’ are
actually stories of a particular class project behind which the nation is to be
constructed.8 Balibar argues that the first neo-racism, in fact, emerged from
the industrial revolution where the proletariat was constructed as an exploited
and political threatening population through racialising discourses (here
Balibar follows Louis Chevalier): ‘material and spiritual poverty, criminality,
congenital vice, physical and moral defects, dirtiness, sexual promiscuity and
the specific diseases which threaten humanity with “degeneracy”’.9 To be
sure, Balibar does not suggest a deterministic relationship between class and
race; his focus rather is on the nature of the articulation between race and
class, or, more specifically, how racism reflects an aestheticization of social
relations central to constructing the field of politics, how racism displaces or
transforms class conflict.10
We suggest the work of Etienne Balibar is very useful for beginning to theorise Race
in contemporary IR
o Especially Race, Nation, Class
Defining the New Racism
After the end of the Second World War, scholars have come to overwhelmingly
conceive of racism as a negative social phenomenon, as opposed to its previous status
as a legitimate world view or theory. “Race” now can only be conceptualized as a
versus external racism, auto-referential versus hetero-referential racism – but then explains the broad
relationship between these phenomena. See: Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation,
Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1998), 37-67.
4
Ibid., 50.
5
Ibid., 54.
6
Ibid. .
7
Ibid., 49-50.
8
Ibid., 61
9
Ibid., 209. See: Louis Chevalier, Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First
Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. F. Jellinek, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1973.
10
Ibid., 58, 205. As Balibar notes in the preface, ‘For my part, I do not believe that racism is the
expression of class structure; rather it is a typical form of political alienation inherent in class struggles
in the field of nationalism, in particularly ambivalent forms’. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation,
Class: Ambiguous Identities, 12.
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3
social construct, which along with class, ethnicity and gender, establishes the social
boundaries of inequality and discrimination.11 In most mainstream academic and
political circles, overtly racist arguments have become if not illegitimate, at least
unacceptable. “Race” as the central theoretical principle intended to explain biological
and social phenomena no longer constitutes a legitimate object of knowledge. The
“racist” intellectual of the pre-second world war era no longer exists as an influential
figure, but only appears occasionally in the marginal sites of the ultra right-wing. As
Balibar argues, however, with the marginalisation of the traditional forms of racism, a
“neo-racism”, which is devoid of “races” but functions in an equally pervasive way
through the concept of culture, has emerged as both a legitimate theory/ world view
and as widely acceptable form of social practice.
Balibar follows Colette Guillaumin and Pierre-Andre Taguieff in the
conceptualization of “neo-racism” as a “differentialist” ideology.12 Accordingly, he
argues that neo-racism is no longer founded on racial but on cultural difference.
Although it shares with other forms of racism the desire for social categorization,
which inevitably creates hierarchies, differentialist racism does not assume that
difference is inscribed on hereditary, natural traits, but on cultural characteristics. This
“racism without races” is, nonetheless, equally essentialist in assuming that the
preservation of cultural boundaries is necessary in order to prevent social conflict.
Within the logic of neo-racism, ‘culture can also function like a nature, and it can
in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a
genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin’.13 The
main target of “neo-racism” is migration as a process that endangers social order by
challenging the boundaries between different cultures. Crossing those boundaries
creates (inevitably it seems) a natural aggressive instinct against foreign traditions and
patterns: racism appears as a natural instinct, an inevitable reaction to the
transgression of the “threshold of tolerance” in each society. Therefore, differentialist
racism revisits biologism from a new perspective.
The most important aspect of this conception of neo-racism is that it can take both an
overtly racist and an anti-racist form. On the one hand, it can be a direct attack on
alien cultures and traditions, and, on the other, it offers an (often benevolent
humanist) explanation for the intolerant attitudes towards alien cultures and traditions.
The latter is what Taguieff has termed “the intolerance of anti-racist discourses”.14 In
both cases, what is at stake is the necessity to preserve order by avoiding the
proximity of incompatible cultures. Therefore, according to Balibar neo-racism is not
a well-structured comprehensive doctrine, but an ideology grounded on antithesis and
contradiction. It has no determined agents, it is neither the prerogative of certain
nations, nor of certain social classes, institutions or individuals. It operates, instead, in
interrelation to humanist universalism, at once its opposite and its condition of
possibility.15 There are two implications:
On the debates surrounding the usage of the term “race” in relation to class and gender see, Anthias
Floya and Yuval-Davis Nira, 1992, Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class
and the Anti-racist Struggle (London: Routledge).
12
Colette Guillaumin, 1972, L’ ideologie raciste, genese et language actuel (Paris: Mouton) and
Taguieff Pierre-André, 1987, La force du prejuge: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris: La
Decouverte)..
13
Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, 22.
14
Taguieff, p. .
15
Etienne Balibar, 1994, “Racism as Universalism”, Masses, Classes, Ideas (NewYork: Routledge)
11
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4
Firstly, “neo-racism” can only be conceived in terms of a historicization of racism,
which does not follow a strict chronological order. Accordingly, Balibar identifies
racism as an ideology that has evolved historically to take different and often
antithetical forms (colonialism, slavery, anti-Semitism, National Socialism). In the
history of racism there is not linear progression from one model to the next. Instead
the past always cohabits the present, even if that is as an impossibility, a negation.
Neo-racism borrows elements from past racisms, but also turns against them, and
denies their legitimacy. In turn, past racisms continue to exist in the margins of
contemporary forms. Although it was born in the mist of decolonisation, “when
humanity was torn from within a single political space”, it stands in direct opposition
to colonial biologism: race no longer constitutes its basic organizing principle.
Furthermore, although it borrows its form from anti-Semitism, the object of hatred is
not the Jews. On the contrary, it often appears to be opposed to anti-Semitism having
appropriated the defeat of National Socialism after the Second World War. Against
the tradition of slavery, external characteristics, such as skin colour or physical
features, are no longer considered as signs of inferiority.16
Secondly, neo-racism is constituted at once as “scientific-expert knowledge” and as
an amalgam of “local knowledges and practices of the self-evident”. Thus, today
expert-scientific knowledge of “differentialist racism” is produced in the name of the
peaceful co-existence between different cultures. The main question that it responds
to is why it is that social conflict occurs. And the reply that it produces is a common
sense one: lack of distance between incompatible cultures. By being a theory that
celebrates a world of cultural difference, neo-racism can become equally antiimperialist and anti-globalization. It is against the destruction of subordinate, minority
cultures and deplores the uniformity of universal schemes, while constantly reminding
us of the urgent need for the preservation of humanity’s diverse cultural heritage.
IR, security and neoracism
In the last decades, the discipline of international relations has undergone a crisis that
led to a critique of the basic concepts and theoretical premises that underpinned
research and analysis. Within this context, the concept of “security”, which had been
traditionally associated with “high politics” and the military aspects of international
relations, has been redefined to include migration and culture, topics traditionally
associated with “low politics”.17 The interdisciplinary opening towards these “nonMaxim Silverman has pressed Balibar on the relationship between ‘neo-racism’ and past racisms,
asking, ‘Given that the term “culture” has in the past been used as a euphemism for “race”, to what
extent can today's neo-racism be described as a new form of racism?’. Balibar responded that both
biological mythology and the discourses of the irreducible nature of culture do the same thing: ‘In the
end, the hierarchy is the same but simply adapted according to specific historical needs’ and indeed,
‘cultural difference has always recieved at least as much, if not more, attention than the strictly
biological discourse’. Maxim Silverman and Etienne Balibar, 'Race, Nation and Class: Interview with
Etienne Balibar', in Maxim Silverman (ed.), Race, Discourse and Power in France (Aldershot, UK:
Avebury, 1991), 71-83, 78-79
17
For two antithetical perspectives that share the same need to establish migrationas a security threat
see Ole Waever, Barry Buzan, Martin Kelstrup and Pierre Lemaitre, eds., Identity, Migration and the
New Security Agenda in Europe (London: Pinter Publishers) and Weiner Myron, 1995, The Global
Migration Crisis: Challenges to States and Human Rights (New York: Harper Collins College
Publishers).
16
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5
military” aspects of security, domains of sociology and anthropology, did not always
produce the expected challenges to traditional state-centric assumptions. Security
practitioners in Western organizations, such as NATO, sought to redefine their post
cold war “raison d’ être” by identifying the dynamics of culture and migration as the
new “threats”. Despite serious disagreements and differences over the moral
implications and the dangers of “securitisation”, both international migration and
inter-cultural exchanges have been discursively anchored to “security threats” to such
an extent that, as Huysmans argued, it became almost impossible to escape the
“security drama” even when it was an utterance born from a critical perspective.18
It is no accident that one of the most complete articulations of “neo-racism” has been
produced by a prominent international relations expert. In the first pages of the “Clash
of Civilizations”, one finds three maps used to graphically represent, as the author
admits in a simplistic manner, the stages of world order since decolonisation.
Huntington’s theory of conflict is founded on an appropriation of anti-racist
arguments of the past. Its mapping is not based on racial divisions, but on cultural
ones. Yet biologism reappears. Conflict arises naturally once the borders between
different cultures break down. There is a natural explanation of human
aggressiveness, a trait that is common to all races, to all peoples, a natural reaction.
Cultural categories appear as static formations that never change. The effects of
cultural difference are biological, natural, eternal. Violent, aggressive instincts always
get activated once the frontiers between cultures break down.
As a correlate of neo-racism, the clash of civilizations thesis allows for the
essentialisation of political communities along new lines, and thus protects certain
ontological assumptions of IR’s once dominant school of thought, realism: the
hermetic nature of political community and the inevitability of conflict. If racism is an
ever present particularist supplement to nationalism, neo-racism functions
analogously as through the notion of ‘civilisation’, at once providing the grounds for a
shared sense of identity while always threatening to disrupt it. Likewise, it reflects an
aesthetic that creates the social terrain for a specific articulation of class and political
community: as racism functioned to stratify labour hierarchies through the
racialisation of manual labour, neo-racism extends the process to a global labour force
through the regulation of immigration to the industrialised world, securitising the
population movements of certain classes of people while normalising the population
movements of others.19 Furthermore, as racism always contains some potential for
obscuring class consciousness, neo-racism can obscure questions of class from
international relations, constructing social divisions and conflict as the natural result
of ethnic variation to the exclusion of the material. 20
New section
The second Gulf War represents a particularly interesting example of neo-racism. The
Bush administration has pursued an explicit policy of establishing an aesthetic of
racial inclusivity in its public image for domestic and international consumption, such
Huysmans Jef, 2002, “Defining Social Constructivism in Security Studies: The Normative Dilemma
of Writing Security”, Alternatives, No. 27, February, pp. 41-62.
19
Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, 211. Silverman and Balibar,
'Race, Nation and Class: Interview with Etienne Balibar', 79
20
Balibar is quite cautious and critical of overly mechanistic or deterministic views on this. Balibar and
Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, 207.
18
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6
as highly choreographed conventions and town hall meetings and appointments such
as Secretary of State and Attorney General. On the other hand, the ‘war on terror’ in
Afghanistan and the subsequent invasion of Iraq relied on ‘identifying’ threats
articulated through a racialising discourses that deployed cultural rather than overtly
biological tropes. We argue that the Bush administration engaged in activating a
‘racism without races’ that remains to a very large extent unproblematised, even by its
critics. Indeed, the terrain established by the logic of neo-racism could be said to
structure the arguments of Bush’s most visible opponents; Michael Moore’s
Fahrenheit 911, for example, likewise juxtaposes an extreme / degenerate cultural
other to a racially inclusive American nationalism.21
‘Racism without races’: aesthetics, security and civilization
George Bush’s public appearances were staged in such a way as to promote an
aesthetics of racial inclusion, often positioning “nonwhites” in the background of his
speeches and meetings. This strategy has been observed from the very beginning of
Bush’s presence in national level politics, including in his campaign materials before
the 2000 election.22 High-level appointments, including the Secretary of education,
the Secretary of State, National Security Advisor and Attorney General also promoted
the idea of an administration dedicated to racial inclusivity.23 This aesthetics – and its
articulation to nation and class – was taken up by “allies” of the United States and
understood as central to the politics of the “war on terror”. When Tony Blair made the
case for bombing Afghanistan to the 2001 Labour Party Conference, he drew
attention to the fact that the Secretary of State was a person of color, although
misrepresenting his class origins: ‘I think of a black man, born in poverty [he was
not], who became chief of their armed forces and is now secretary of state, Colin
Powell, and I wonder frankly whether such a thing could have happened here’
(Younge 2003).24 The inaccurate claim that Powell was born into poverty echoes a
strong motif in US nationalism, the ‘“American dream” of material success through
individual effort’ that is understood to be color-blind (even by many of its most
marginalized citizens (Frederickson 1998)
The Bush administration’s political aesthetic did not necessarily translate directly into
political approval among visible minorities in the United States. Nevertheless, the
politics of national unity did seem to transcend racial divisions in the aftermath of
9/11. The well-known and visible head of the hip-hop label Death Row Records, Suge
Knight, argued: ‘We’re supporting Bush, we’re supporting the USA. At this moment
there’s no such thing as ghetto, middle class, or rich. There’s only the United States’
This film’s statement of the war should not be seen as one limited to the US context (e.g., it won an
award at France’s Cannes film festival though it received no mention at the US Film and Motion
Picture’s Academy Awards); nor should neo-racist logic of the Bush Administration’s aesthetic politics
of security.
22
Parmelee, Carl Hulse, 'Alabama Delegates Say Racial Differences Stark', Sarasota Herald-Tribune,
16 August 2000 p. A4
23
Greenberg; National/Foreign
PICKING OF POWELL, RICE SPURS A PUSH ON AFRICA , Anne E. Kornblut, Globe Staff , 1553
words, 25 December 2000, The Boston Globe, THIRD, A1
24
As Guardian reporter Gary Younge goes on to point out in this piece, ‘the truth is that as prime
minister Blair could appoint a black person to the post of foreign secretary any time he wants’. Gary
Younge, 'The Us, Race and War', The Guardian, 11 August 2003.
21
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7
(Croucher 2006: 181). Bush’s approval ratings in November 2001 reached 89% in the
Hispanic population, stronger than his general level of support (Croucher 2006: 198).
Such national unity would diminish over time (before even the Katrina disaster),
though representatives of visible-minority communities would work to sustain it.
Shelia Croucher notes: ‘when an April 2003 Gallup poll showed 78% of white
Americans supporting the US-led war in Iraq, and only 29% of black Americans
voicing support, NAACP Chairman Julian Bond quickly released a statement
emphasizing that the NAACP supports our troops and urging African Americans to do
the same’ (Croucher 2006: 193).
PATRIOT ACT
After September 11th, it was strongly emphasized that it was not on the basis of
distinct racial characteristics that enemies were to be constructed, but on the basis of
cultural traits. A central section of the PATRIOT act was accordingly dedicated to the
“sense of Congress condemning discrimination against Arab and Muslim
Americans”.25 This seemingly anti-racist sense was placed at the very beginning of
the text, highlighting the significance of a distinction between members and non
members of the national community: “Arab Americans, Muslim Americans and
Americans from South Asia play a vital role in our Nation and are entitled to nothing
less than the full rights of every American”. By negation, this sentence depicts the
racist profiling of the terrorists the Act aims to eliminate: Arab, Muslim, and South
Asian “aliens” are in fact the omnipresent threat to the Nation. Despite their biological
proximity (shame descent), terrorists and minority citizens are thus identified as
possessing distinct cultural characteristics. Acquiring the American citizenship
signifies an apprentice of superior cultural norms translated into an ethics of
individual responsibility, respect for human rights, value freedom and respect for
difference. The text of the Act emphasized that it is anti-American to harass and act
violently against American citizens of a different race. “The Acts of violence that
have been taken against Arab and Muslim Americans since September 11, 2001
attacks against the US should be and are condemned by all Americans who value
freedom”. By affirming American cultural values, however, this statement legitimizes
-by negation again- the right (if not the obligation) to act violently against Arab and
Muslim non American citizens in order to protect the freedom of Americans.
Ultimately the test for inclusion is the ability to sacrifice oneself for the Nation and
adhere to its moral values, as the example of a 23 year old American of Pakistani
descent who has died in the World Trade Centre in an attempt to save fellow citizens
exemplifies. Not only are the civil rights, and civil liberties of those “different”
Americans to be respected, not only are the crimes against them to be punished, but
also the “Nation is called upon to recognize the patriotism of fellow citizens of fellow
citizens from all ethnic, racial and religious backgrounds”. Race, therefore is
constructed as a cultural ‘fact’ inscribed in national belonging: by acquiring
citizenship one is assumed to also to throw away all those negative cultural-racial
traits associated with terrorism, while retaining only the more benign features of racial
difference (such as color, external biological features, even religious habits and dress
code). Thus practices of inclusion and denunciation of racism are interlinked as they
H.R.3162 “An Act to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and the around the world to
enhance law enforcement investigatory tools and for other purposes”, 107th Congress, 1 st Session
October 24 2004 available at http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.pdf
25
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8
establish the boundaries that exclude all those who are to be denied even respect of
basic human rights, and legitimize the crimes committed against them.
Migration was thus framed as a security issue: under title IV of the PATRIOT Act the
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 was amended to include several policy
measures to enhance border controls, including increased spending for border patrol
personnel, improved monitoring technology and a new cross-agency information
system that would allow multiple identity control of all applicants for visa entry. As a
result, the preoccupation with the safeguarding of the borders of the American nation,
which were defined in territorial terms, became the central theme organizing policy
discourses of immigration. Aliens were identified as the main threat to national
security.
Security and civilization
One of the first themes to be articulated in reaction to the attacks of 11 September
2001, and one of the most enduring, was that the attacks in the United States
represented more than mere criminal acts, rather they were attacks on civilization
itself. While the official expressions of this discourse typically included assurances
that (‘moderate’) Islam and Arabs were not the enemy, the policies that followed
engaged in ‘racial profiling’ constructed around perceptions of national origin and
religious faith.
One of the Bush Administration’s first reactions to the attacks was expressed on 11
September by Colin Powell, who argued: “It’s a war not just against the United States,
it’s a war against civilisation”.26 This expression was echoed by Democrats as well:
Senator Joseph Biden, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee claimed “This
is a struggle between civilization and barbarity” the next day while passing a
unanimous resolution condemning the attacks.27 Foreign leaders likewise invoked the
idea of civilisation the day after the attacks: the Irish president Mary McAleese
claimed it was a crime against civilisation,28 the German chancellor Gerhard Schroder
argued it was an attack on the civilized world,29 and British Foreign Secretary Jack
Straw argued: “It was an attack on all of us - an attack on freedom and democracy, on
civilisation and on humanity”.30
The rhetoric of the Bush administration, and particularly of Bush himself, would
become more elaborate, constructing a discourse of war against an enemy beyond the
bounds of civilization: an enemy that hides in caves and ‘in the shadows with no
regard for human life’ and that ‘can only survive in darkness’.31 As Richard Johnson
26
Powell says US will respond to attacks as if at war. By FT.COM STAFF. 930 words 12 September
2001 Financial Times
27
Biden: `This is a struggle between civilization and barbarity.' CARL WEISER Gannett News
Service12 September 2001
28
Stunned world leaders voice outrage and condemnation ... 12 September 2001 Yorkshire Post
29
Terrorist attacks 'act of war' says Bush. By FT.COM STAFF. 1097 words 12 September 2001
Financial Times (FT.Com)
30
EU ministers meet with NATO chief on U.S. attack. 203 words 12 September 2001 08:46 AM
Reuters News
31
Richard Johnson, 'Defending Ways of Life: The (Anti-)Terrorist Rhetorics of Bush and Blair',
Theory, Culture and Society, 19/4 (2002), 211-31, 221 Debra Merskin, 'The Construction of Arabs as
Enemies: Post-September 11 Discourse of George W. Bush', Mass Communication & Society, 7/2
(2004), 157-75, 167-9
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9
has observed, ‘these are inhuman, animal and devilish images … fixed and with no
history’ (Johnson 2002: 221). When the idea that Iraq played a role in the attacks was
introduced in Bush’s January 2002 ‘Axis of Evil’ speech, it was similarly constructed
in terms of a ‘regime with something to hide from the civilised world’ (Merskin 2004:
172). (The theme of ‘evil’ and the idea of ‘evil-doers’ would of course also be
consistent motifs in Bush’s rhetoric from his earliest statements (Merskin 2004: 1669).)
The Bush administration is not the only government to engage in this discourse of
civilization; it is widespread. In the UK, the Blair government uses it frequently, as
does the British media; indeed, the Sunday Times reprinted Samuel Huntington’s
Clash of Civilizations article the weekend after the attack on the World Trade Center.
The then Italian Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi went so far as to claim explicitly the
superiority of Western civilization over Islamic civilization on 28 September 2001.32
The Spanish government called the war on terror a struggle of ‘civilization against
barbarism’.33 T.Y. Ismael and John Measor have documented how the frame of the
‘Clash of Civilizations’ structured the discourse of Canadian public officials and the
media (Ismael and Measor 2003).
The discourse of civilisation is mitigated by assurances that neither Islam nor Arabs
are the enemy. As early as 13 September 2001, as a reaction to attacks on people of
Middle Eastern and South Asian origin or decent, the US State Department’s Civil
Rights Division announced: ‘any threats of violence or discrimination against Arab or
Muslim Americans or Americans of South Asian descent are not just wrong and unAmerican, but also are unlawful and will be treated as such’ {Hassan, 2003 #1213}.
On 16 September 2001, Vice President Cheney stated in a televised interview that:
‘The president has been very clear, and it would be a huge mistake for we as
Americans to assume that this represents some kind of--or should lead us to some
kind of condemnation of Islam. It's clearly not the case. This is a perversion, if you
will, of some of these religious beliefs by an extremist group’.34
Such reassurances have underscored the idea of an extremist element. In the UK,
Tony Blair has sought to reframe the civilization discourse in ostensibly more
inclusive terms. He has suggested, “This is not a clash between civilisations. It is a
clash about civilisation. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction”
(Tempest 2006). He argued that Islam in its origins had been inclusive and
progressive, while in the 20th century, it had become "uncertain, insecure and on the
defensive" (Tempest 2006). This position builds on his response to a 2005 proposal
from Spain and Turkey to promote an ‘alliance of civilisations’, which he welcomed
‘as a way of joining "civilised people from whatever race or religion to combat the
barbarity of terrorism" (Tempest 2005).
While the rhetoric of the threat behind the war on terror appeals directly to
civilisations rather than race, the actual response to the perceived threat has involved
32
War On Terror - Superstars Unite - FURY OVER PM MUSLIM SLUR. JAMES HARDY. 28
September 2001 Mirror
33
War on terror is struggle of "civilization against barbarism" - Spanish minister. 23 May 2003
BBC Monitoring European
34
‘Interview: Vice President Dick Cheney discusses the attack on America and response to terrorism’,
16 September 2001, NBC News: Meet the Press
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racial profiling. Racial profiling can be understood as the use of racial or ethnic
appearance as a predictor of who is involved in an activity, usually crime or terrorism.
It replaces the presumption of innocence and the ‘preponderance of evidence’ with
‘probably cause’ and ‘reasonable suspicion’ (Hassan 2003). The figures for those
subject to ‘preventive’ measures in the US vary, due in part to the fact that racial
profiling is not recognized as an official policy (though some in Congress, notably
Rep. John Conyers, have been pressing towards official recognition that it takes
place), nevertheless, the numbers are certainly large. Gary Younge reports, 5,000 men
were ‘preventively detained’ and 19,000 sought for ‘voluntary interviews’ in the
aftermath of the attacks on the basis of national origin (Younge 2006). In the
following year, 170,000 men from 24 predominantly Muslim countries (and North
Korea), were subject to interview and fingerprinting under a ‘special registration’
program (Younge 2006). (None of these measures resulted in a terrorism conviction
(Younge 2006).) This year the US announced that it wanted the require Britons of
Pakistani descent to hold special visas to enter (which the UK would not abide).35
Salah D. Hassan argues:
It has become increasingly clear that the Bush administration opposes criminal
acts of racial violence against Middle Easterners and South Asians in order to
locate unequivocally its own racial policies of exclusion, surveillance and
incarceration of Arabs and Muslims within the rule of law. In other words, if
Bush succeeded in containing the racist vigilantism that erupted after
September 11, 2001, it was only so that the administration could carry out its
own legal assault on Arabs based largely on an unstated policy of racial
profiling. (Hassan 2003)
Practices of racial profiling are enabled by the redefinition of civil rights under antiterrorism legislation, the Patriot Act most notably in the United States. However, such
practices and legislation are not the exclusive domain of the US. Many countries
around the world used the attacks on the United States and the climate since then to
change their laws. The Economist noted as early as 2002 the widespread response in
European countries and the European Union, which focused on new powers to
investigate and detail suspects, expanded the scope of what constituted a terrorist
organization and actions against asylum-seekers and immigrants, ‘though their
motives in doing so have little to do with security’ (Economist 2002). Canada’s Antiterrorism Act similarly allows for greater powers of surveillance, detention without
charge, preventive arrest and the designation of groups as terrorist organizations, both
in its own right (which includes ‘sunset’ clauses on some measures) and through
changes to existing legislation such as the National Defence Act. 36 (The UN
Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has recently sought
information on how Canada will prevent ‘racial, religious and ethnic profiling’,
largely in response to the case of a Syrian-born Canadian who was deported to Syria,
and tortured there, by the US on the basis of Canadian security information. 37 The
UK, both as a response to 9/11 and the 7/7 London attacks, has several recent pieces
of anti-terrorism legislation: the Terrorism bill (2005), Serious Organised Crime and
Police Act (2005), Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act (2001). These too have
come under scrutiny vis-à-vis the question of racial profiling: the London police has
35
US 'wants British Pakistanis to have entry visas' Matt Weaver Wednesday May 2, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,2070680,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=1
36
For an overview, see: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/cdnsecurity/
37
http://www.cbc.ca/cp/national/070219/n02199A.html
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11
agreed to publish its stop and search figures in response to concerns of racist spot
checking.38
As Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar has observed, since 9/11, racial profiling has become
more acceptable as a public discourse (Cuéllar 2003: 13). While some who defend the
practice argue unapologetically that different racial groups represent a national
security threat,39 other defenders of racial profiling have suggested that because relies
on statistical generalizations and treats everyone in a particular category equally, it is
amounts to ‘racial discrimination with a non-racist rationale’ (Kinsley 2001).
An Arab-looking man heading toward a plane is statistically more likely to be
a terrorist.... If trying to catch terrorists this way makes sense at all, then
Willie-Sutton logic says you should pay more attention to people who look
like Arabs than to people who don't. This is true even if you are free of all
ethnic prejudices. It's not racism. (Kinsley 2001)
(As should be apparent from our discussion, this view is extremely problematic; not
least because it attempts to claim statistical significance for a category as subjective as
‘Arab-looking’, indeed without any specific evidence.40)
Perceptions of security measures, including racial profiling, within targeted groups,
furthermore, appear to have a significant class dimension. Gary Younge provides an
illuminating comparison between the status of Muslim communities in the US and the
UK. Overall, Muslims are viewed less favourably in the US than in Britain and
France, however, their economic position in the US is better than in Europe. Though
the wages of Arab and Muslim workers in the United States fell by 10% in the
aftermath of 9/11, they remain on average better paid and educated than non-Muslims.
By contrast, the Muslim community in Britain has the highest rate of male
unemployment of any religious group and the least number of professional
qualifications. Younge suggests that the responses to new security measures in the US
and the UK among Arab and Muslim populations are mediated by this
(socio)economic standing (Younge 2006). (His observations are supported by Sally
Howell and Andrew Shryock’s study of the Arab and Mulism communities near
Detroit, MI, which reflects a great deal of variation according to religion, national
origin, and class. See: (Howell and Shryock 2003: 447).)
38
Met to give Terror Act stop and search figures, Sandra Laville, crime correspondent, Friday June 1,
2007, The Guardian
39
For example, Malkin, Michelle. "In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling" in World
war II and the War on Terror" Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2004
40
For a critique of racial profiling from a US legal perspective, see: Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar,
'Choosing Anti-Terror Targets by National Origin and Race', Harvard Latino Law Review, /6 (2003),
9-41.
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