Workshop ‘Racism and Xenophobia: Key Issues,
Mechanisms and Policy Opportunities’
European Commission, Brussels 5-6th April, 2001
Theoretical Considerations on Xenophobia:
Cultural Violence, Nationalism and Everyday Life
Gerard Delanty
(University of Liverpool)
Discussion Paper For Phase I ‘Concepts and Models Explaining Racism and
Xenophobia’. (Please note this is a draft document for discussion/background to my
presentation and is not for quotation or to be regarded as complete. It is part of work
in progress for a book on nationalism)
The cultural logic of the radical nationalisms has never been fully examined. The
central argument proposed here is that the cultural logic of the extreme nationalism
cannot be seen as ideologically coherent but is instead based on a recombination of
the symbolic and cognitive codes of everyday life. We argue that nationalism entails a
political recodification of the symbolic violence that is embedded in everyday life.
The success of nationalist discourse is due to its ability to resonate with cultural
values and ways of thinking that are constitutive of the life world. To understand this
aspect of nationalist discourse is the aim of the present section.
The first and most general point to be made is that the new radical nationalism is a
product of the pluralization of contemporary postmodern culture. It may be suggested
that nationalism has taken to an extreme the concerns of postmodern culture with
difference, security and belonging. In a sense these core features of postmodern times
have been inverted or re-codified by nationalism into symbolic violence that is based
on authoritarian and xenophobic values leading. The preoccupation with the self in
modernity has been overshadowed by a concern with the other today. In modernity
the other was exterior to the self; today, as is exemplified in multiculturalism and
postmodern thought, the other is seen as part of the self. But the kind of difference
that is expressed in radical nationalism is one of xenophobic fear and reaction to
otherness.1 The denial of the other within the self defines the cultural presuppositions
of xenophobic nationalism: ‘Difference breeds hatred,’ Nietszche argued.
1
See de Vries and Weber (1997) for various perspectives on violence and difference.
We should not see xenophobia as an irrational and therefore an inexplicable
psycho-social disposition.2 Hatred of the other does not explain very much. The term
is often used, to mean hatred as opposed to fear of otherness (the stranger, foreigners).
But there are major differences between hatred and fear as psycho-social dispositions.
Fear may lead to hatred but hatred may not lead to fear. Hostility is a term that is also
used to suggest something between outright hatred and fear. Moreover, xenophobia is
not the same as racism or fascism. Racism is much more explicitly an extreme hatred
of particular races and is based on a cultural and ideological theory of the biological
superiority of the self over the other. Fascism is not primarily an ideology about
otherness, and in its classic form in Italian fascism the preoccupation with minorities
or other national groups was relatively minor. Indeed, anti-Semitism was marginal in
the case of Italian fascism. Fascism is primarily a political ideology of absolute
loyalty to the national state. These distinctions are important to make, particularly in
the context of radical nationalism since its presuppositions are not primarily about
race or about hatred. The strict meaning of xenophobia, literally fear of the other,
should be retained and distinguished from other and related dispositions. This is
because, as will be shortly demonstrated, the xenophobic component of nationalist
discourse is more about fear of the other within the self than hatred and in most of its
expressions explicit racism is not evident. We thus making the strong argument that
radical nationalism is primarily driven by xenophobia and not by racism or fascism or
even as something as vague and ill-defined as ethnocentrism. The implication of this
view is that xeonophobia while often being a basis of racism is quite distinct from
racism. Indeed, many of the historical forms of racism did not emanate from
xenophobia but from science. What then is xenophobia?
Xenophobia is rooted in the symbolic violence of everyday life from where it
derives its primary motivations, but is also linked to the symbolic violence in cultural
worldviews from where it derives legitimation. Distinguishing then between the level
of everyday motivations within the life world and cultural legitimations, we can
discuss the cultural logic of radical nationalism in the following way. The primary
motivational sources of xenophobia that derive from everyday life can be resentment,
disappointment, anxiety and uncertainty, and cultural trauma.
2
Hatred is often used as a vague term that is rarely theorized sociologically, as in
Hockenos (1993).
Resentment is one of the main expressions of hostility against others and which can
be expressed in the more overt form of xenophobia but is more fundamentally a
feature of modern life. Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals regarded resentment as
deeply embedded in modern culture, an expression of a powerful reactive current in
modernity. It is an opposition to the other within the self and to the other outside the
self. In either case it is an attitude that constructs self-identity through negative
identity. In order to exist the ‘slave morality’ requires an other to provide the
reference point for the identity of the self.3 Greenfeld and Chirot have also noted the
role of ressentiment in non-western nationalism, which while taking over western
Enlightenment ideas and practices developed at the same time a deeply rooted
ressentiment of those values and which often became the basis of later xenophobia
and agression (Greenfeld and Chirot, 1994, pp.102-124).
Disappointment as a result of the disjuncture between expectations and experience
is another source of xenophobia. Disappointment with the promises of modernity has
led many voters into supporting political causes that have projected guilt onto a
scapegoat, such as a national minority or ethnic group that may be associated with an
external community. This might explain how revolutions of rising expectations have
often been transformed into reactionary nationalist movements. Several studies of
extreme right-wing voting in the western Europe in the 1990s, emphasize the role of
protest rather than right-wing ideology. It would appear that dissatisfaction with
democracy more than right-wing ideology is what is significant (Falter and Klein,
1996, p. 53). However, there is general agreement that some ideological
predispositions are required for dissatisfaction to play a major role in extreme right
wing voting.
Anxiety and uncertainty also play a role in shaping the conditions that a conducive
to xenophobia. Cultural trauma is a more pronounced kind of anxiety that arises as a
result of a total break-down in the social order that leads to a ‘cultural shock’ (Neal,
(1998); Sztompka, 2000). One of the consequences of cultural trauma is a culture of
distrust which can easily be conducive to xenophobia and inter-group violence.
However, xenophobia can be linked to more explicit forms of symbolic violence
which have a more pronounced legitimating function in maintaining otherness and in
maintaining adversarial frames. Examples of these might include (a) racism, (b) anti3
For Max Scheler in a philosophical work, Ressentiment, published in 1915,
semitism, (c) homophobia (d) misogyny (e) citizenship and nationality, (f) moral
purity, (g) ethnocentrism, (h) exoticism. On these levels otherness is expressed in
more objectivist terms than in the symbolic violence of the habitus, where the
otherness of the ‘they’ is subordinated to the identity of the ‘we’. This in the case of
racism and anti-Semitism, which are more than forms of prejudice that may arise from
ignorance or fear, but are ideologically and often theoretically elaborated.
Homophobia and misogyny are forms of hatred that are nourished by some of the
cultural practices of everyday life, such as sexism and patriarchy. Citizenship itself
makes a fundamental distinction between citizens and aliens, and as such offers a
weak cultural basis of exclusion (Mann, 1997). Ethnocentricism is more present in
some cultural forms than in others, depending on the relationship between cultural
and political identities. If the political identity of the state rests on a prior cultural
identity which is primarily defined by ethnic, primordial codes, the cultural identity is
likely to exhibit a high degree of ethnocentrism. Moral purity can be a consequence of
ethnocentrism, as Barrington Moore has argued (Moore, 2000). Exoticism may also
be mentioned as a relatively weak cultural basis of otherness, and this can also be
related to the role of fantas (Todorov, 1993; Salecl, 1993).
To separate symbolic violence that is expressed in the new radical nationalism into
two levels, a strong and a weak level, allows us trace the relations between the social
and cultural sides in a more intricate manner and in way that avoids conflations of its
different dimensions. This involves distinguishing two levels of symbolic violence;
one the level of everyday life (i.e. social practices) and on the cognitive level of
cultural narratives, codes, adversarial and symbolic codes. In contrast to Johan
Galtung’s well known concept of cultural violence as a form of violence that is
embedded in culture as opposed to the structural violence in institutions, we see
cultural violence as more differentiated (Galtung, 1990). For Galtung cultural
violence relates to those aspects of culture that are exemplified by religion, ideology,
language, art and even science and which may indirectly legitimate violence. This
neglects the more subtle and less coherent dimension of symbolic violence in the
practices that constitute habitus, where it may also provide an indirect basis for
violence, but one that is less articulated than on the cultural level.
‘ressentment’ is the condition of modernity itself (Scheler, 1972).
Symbolic violence is contained in everyday life in several cognitive frames and
symbolic dispositions that express xenophobia or condusive to it. Fear of the other has
arguably increased with modernity, which has brought strangeness into the heart of
the life world through immigration, multiculturalism, consumption, tourism,
education, and value pluralization. Fear of the other accompanies modernity’s logic of
inclusion in the form of a construction of different order of exclusion, ranging from
exotic fantasies to xenophobic neo-nazism (Theweliet, 1987). Xenophobia is shaped
by the logic of exclusion – the separation of the ‘we’ from the ‘they’ - and the
construction of adversarial frames, requiring a negative identification by which the
‘they’ becomes an enemy. Carl Schmitt (1970) generalized such relations of enmity to
all of politics, which he believed was always about the fundamental division of
‘friends and enemies.’ But his reductionist philosophy failed to see that the us/them
polarity is distinct from the quite different logic of xenophobic politics by which the
‘they’ becomes first an ‘other’ and then an enemy. However the shift from exclusion
to adversity is a very subtle one. Most groups are based on a sense of the ‘we’ as
distinct from a ‘them’. The potentiality for other-creating mechanisms to become
adversarial is always present.4 For instance, a sense of grievance or an injustice can
transform the self identity of the we into an exclusive preoccupation with the other
who is made responsible for the fate of the we. The normal means of coping with this
necessity for boundary maintenance against an enemy is punishment sanctioned by
law and other civic norms of justice, but other mechanisms can be employed, such as
denial (Cohen, 2001). Xenophobia results when the self loses its self-identity and
seeks in the other the reference point for its identity. In such circumstances the other
ceases to be an enemy as such, but a pathological expression of self-identity.
Cultural codes of otherness can thus arise from the fundamental facts of group
identity and can be sustained by adversarial codes which may involve xenophobic
dimensions. However, not all adversarial frames become xenophobic, just as not all
tightly defined we-groups become adversarial. Xenophobic relations result when the
adversarial frames that maintain otherness are unable to maintain exclusion, or when
the logic of inclusion and exclusion breaks down or becomes diffuse. The claim that
is being made, then, is that xenophobic relations do not arise directly from the logic of
exclusion and nor do they arise directly from adversarial frames. Such forms of
4
For an inspiring analysis of some of the mechanisms, see Gamson (1995). See also
symbolic violence are, to varying degrees, normal. Xenophobia becomes a
pronounced pathological force when adversarial frames arise and, crucially, are
unable to maintain the fundamental boundaries of self and other. Xenophobia is thus
the pathological condition that arises when the self is unable to cope with otherness
and is destructive of both self and other. Thus, many forms of xenophobia result from
situations where, becase of social and political change, the internal other becomes
associated with an external other, as in the case of national minorities who become
perceived as a threat due to their association with a larger group in a neighbouring
state. Especially in situations where the other is so close to the self, the other is
generally defined in reified codes and by the construction of a scapegoat, for instance,
homosexuals.5 Theoretically, then, xenophobia can be understood as akin to the logic
of reification, by which the other is a fetish for the self.
Because of the latent symbolic violence that is inherent in group dynamics, many
forms of nationalism are potentially xenophobic. In Karl Deutsch’s famous definition,
xenophobia is written into the heart of nationalism: ‘A nation is a group of persons
united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of the
neighbors’ (Deutsch, 1969, p. 3). In the extreme case it can lead to ethnic cleansing
and ultimately to genocide. In this chapter we have argued for the need to appreciate
the cultural logic by which symbolic violence in everyday life and in the habitus of
the group can be made to serve adversarial frames on the cultural level and to
distinguish both of these from the pathological condition of xenophobia. The
implications of this is that extreme forms of nationalism feed off the xenophobia that
is present in everyday life and in cultural codes.
Nationalism is part of the global world and will not wither away along with the
state, as a older social theory once believed. Ways of living with it will have to be
found. In the next chapter we discuss prospects of accommodating nationalism and
diffusing it of some of its violent dimensions.
Address
Professor Gerard Delanty, Department of Sociology, University of Liverpool, Eleanor
Rathbone Building, Bedford Street South, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69
7ZA, UK. Email: delanty@liverpool.ac.uk
Rothchild and Groth (1995) and Wendt (1994).
55
This can be compared to what Freud called the narcissism of minor differences. See
Blok (1998).