Nationalist discourse and
exclusionary tolerance
Dr Georgie Wemyss
g.wemyss@surrey.ac.uk
Britishness and Belonging
• Wider study investigating politics of belonging in
contemporary Britain.
• Exploring cultural processes whereby a dominant notion
of Britishness is asserted and reasserted.
• ‘British culture’ is analysed as a flexible dominant
discourse, able to shift to accommodate challenges over
time and space.
• Focus on how a keyword, ‘tolerance’ works in
combination with other discursive elements to give what I
define as ‘the dominant white liberal discourse’ the
flexibility necessary to maintain dominance when
challenged by competing discourses associated with
subordinate groups.
Toleration as a Practice?
• ‘Toleration’ and ‘tolerance’ have a vast
literature, especially in political theory.
• Political theorists tend to focus on
‘toleration’ as a ‘practice’. For example
Walzer and predecessors focused on the
different possible institutional and legal
arrangements of ‘toleration’.
•
Michael Walzer 1997 On Toleration focused on 5 regimes of toleration.
Rainer Forst (political theorist) views
toleration as a contested concept:
1. The permission concept: The authority
gives qualified permission to members of
minority to live according to their beliefs
so long as minority accept their
subordinate position eg 1629 Toleration
Act
2. The respect concept: Tolerating parties
recognise each other in reciprocal
”horizontal” way. eg ”mutual toleration”
• Political theory tended to approach toleration
from above. How a ‘liberal state’ should
institutionalise ‘toleration’.
• From the perspective of the ‘tolerators’
• This approach has sometimes homogenized
minority groups, reified ‘cultures’ and ignored
struggles within minority groups.
• My approach closer to:
• Wendy Brown’s (Regulating Aversion) far
reaching analysis of tolerance as a mode of
national and transnational governmentality.
Locating dominant white liberal
discourse.
• Theoretical framework constructed out of the
distinct analyses of power developed by
Foucault and Gramsci.
• Combine Foucault's theories on discourse with
Gramsci's writing on hegemony in order to
locate and identify white liberal discourse and
explore how it works.
• How do members of different social groups
accept, manipulate or contest dominant
discourse of ‘British culture?
‘Tolerance’ as contested keyword in
dominant discourse
I explore ‘tolerance’, as keyword, central to white
liberal discourse and the maintenance of
cultural hegemony in Britain.
I map its shifting meanings in the context of
microprocesses of power embodied in the dayto-day discourses and practices of people in
east London and Britain.
‘tolerance’ and ‘intolerance’ work in white liberal
discourse, not as antonyms, but as mobilising
metaphors, constituents of a semantic cluster in
the dominant white liberal discourse.
4 elements of dominant white
liberal discourse.
1.Privileges and naturalises ‘white’ experience,
making ‘white’ subject invisible by normalising it.
2. Asserts particular historical narratives and
suppresses alternative histories, including of
violence of European colonialism.
3. Constructs ‘white’ as a category (or subcategory
eg ‘East Ender) which ‘others’ may ‘aspire’ to.
4.Global, with internally differentiated discursive
formations.
‘Tolerance’ central to all 4.
How tolerance works?
• How ‘tolerance’ is understood as a positive
value
• Who has the power to grant or remove
‘tolerance’
• Who are the shifting categories of ‘tolerators’
and ‘tolerated’?
• How it works flexibly to both include and exclude
different categories of people
• How is ‘tolerance’ contested by the ‘tolerated’?
As a keyword central to the
marketing strategy of the ‘East End’
• Leadership attempt to add more inclusive meanings to
'The East End' and 'East Enders' in the dominant
discourse.
• Cluster of words that included 'diversity',' rich culture'
'friendly‘, 'multiculture‘, cosmopolitan and 'tolerance' to
describe 'The East End' and 'East Enders'.
• All the words appear to have positive meanings
associated with including people from different
backgrounds.
• The dominant discourse appeared to shift to
include more diverse categories of people as
'East Enders‘.
• But the detail used to picture or describe who
the essential 'East Enders' were, remained the
same and continued to exclude non-white
residents.
• In these contexts, tolerance works within its
semantic cluster to include ‘white east
enders’ as the ‘tolerators’ and the
‘multicultural’ subjects as the ‘tolerated’ in
the new, rebranded East End.
Opinion polls
• Opinion poll in Sunday Express concerned the ‘reality of
racism’ in a country with ‘a good reputation for race
tolerance’. A continuum constructed with tolerance
at the positive end and racism at the opposite,
negative extreme.
• Interviewees’ responses were used demonstrate that
different categories of people are either more 'tolerant' or
more 'racist'.
• Self categorisation of ‘tolerators’ (‘we’ are tolerant, they
are ‘racist’. ‘We’ tolerate’ ‘them’)
Letters to the press
• Letter to the local paper ELA re BNP councillor elected
because:
• ‘ the 'tolerance' of the ‘people of East London had been
undermined’
• . The letter did not directly say what east Londoners were
'tolerant' of, nor who or what they were 'undermined' by.
meaning was that the people of 'East London' were the established
white population who were being undermined by the Bengali
population and their supporters.
One example of many where the dominant discourse to assert the
'tolerance' of East End- British people in the face of those who
test that 'tolerance'.
Challenges to ‘tolerance’
•
•
Tolerance of what? Crime? Black people?
I don’t know if that is a good word to use … ‘We accept Black people. We accept
Asian people. Do you f***! This country is not tolerant. Listen, if this country was
tolerant we wouldn’t get this harassment. (Samir).
•
I don’t think the tolerance is going to work unless you put in positive action. You can’t
just talk about it. You can’t just let people say what they like, it doesn’t mean
tolerance. Tolerance doesn’t mean that you can deny somebody else’s right ,
you can kill somebody, you can abuse somebody. This is not tolerance. It
should be fair and everybody should have a fair right to do the things they want to do.
They shouldn’t be victimised by other people for the sake of tolerance. You know, we
are tolerating all the racism (Monir).
•
The normative cultural processes of the dominant white discourse are visible most
clearly to those it dominates or does violence to. Having experienced verbal racism
and violent racist attacks, both Samir and Monir clearly challenge the dominant
construction of a ‘tolerant Britain’. The subject of Asian tolerance was racism.
The shifting subjects of tolerance evident in their discourses expose the
meaning of 'tolerance' as putting up with something unpleasant: Racism, crime
and black people. However neither question the dominant discourse of tolerance of
ethnic minorities being a positive national aspiration.
•
Shifting categories of tolerators and
tolerated
• Winston Churchill MP made three
speeches about immigration within the
space of 4 months in 1993.
• In each speech the groups included as
‘tolerators’ and excluded as ‘tolerated’
shifted in response to challenges and
audience.
To Bolton Conservative Association
28.5.93
• We must call a halt to the relentless flow of immigrants
into the country, especially from the Indian subcontinent. The population of many areas of our northern
cities is now well over 50% immigrant and Moslems
claim that there are now more than 2 million of their coreligionists in Britain. Mr Major seeks to reassure us with
the old refrain: “ There’ll always be an England …” and
promises us that, 50 years on, spinsters will still be
cycling to Communion of Sunday mornings – more likely
the Muezzin will be calling Allah’s faithful to the High
Street mosque! …a halt must be called – and urgently if
the British way of life is to be preserved
To Association of Jewish exServicemen 19.7.93
We must ask ourselves why such attacks are increasing in number
and what steps can be taken to minimise them. In this regard we
must not ignore, or sweep under the carpet, the impact on our
society and the British way of life of the arrival in our midst over the
past 40 years of 3 to 4 million immigrants from Africa, Asia and
the Caribbean. The unhappiness – indeed bitterness – of the
indigenous population runs very deep in those areas of the inner
cities where the native English find that they have become the
‘ethnic minority’ in their own land and where their children have to
attend schools which, not infrequently, are made up 80% or more of
ethnic minorities.
• The toleration shown by the overwhelming majority of British
people to the establishment of a sizeable ethnic minority in their
midst has been nothing short of remarkable. But the relentless flow
of tens of thousands of immigrants – both legal and illegal - to this
country each year risks breaching the limits of toleration…
Breakfast with Frost 19.9.93
• One has to have regard particularly to the very
large scale of illegal immigration, which
according to senior immigration officers exceeds
by a large measure those allowed in legally. This
adds to the pressure in these communities and
provokes reactions … No-one is seeking to
justify these reactions, far from it, but they are
inevitable, so it’s very important we stop adding
to the pressures in our society and have a much
stronger policy in dealing with illegal
immigration
‘Tolerance’ central to 4 elements in white
liberal discourse:
• 1. Tolerance works to normalize ‘white’ category. ‘Tolerators’ invisible
to themselves, natural occupiers of top of the hierarchy of belonging.
• 2. Tolerance works to assert particular historical narratives and
suppress alternative histories including the histories of colonial
violence and violence against minorities.
• 3. Tolerance shifts to include different categories of people as the
‘tolerators’ and ‘tolerated’. Whilst the notion of tolerance remains the
same, its subjects (the tolerated), and those who have the power to
tolerate, change. It works to exclude and include different categories
of people into distinct levels of the hierarchy of belonging.
• 4. Tolerance is global. Its roots in 17th century liberal philosophy,
central to the dominant nationalist discourses of the ex-English
settler colonies. White liberal discourse is global, with internally
differentiated discursive formations. The contextual mobilisation of
tolerance is integral to those discursive formations.
.
Tolerance and Power
mobilisation of tolerance raises points for understanding how the
dominant white liberal discourse works:
• 1.Tolerance constructs minority groups as undesirable subjects whilst
working as a common sense positive national quality in the dominant
discourse.
•
2. Tolerance obscures the violence of racism from those who have no
experience of it.
•
3.Flexibility of ‘tolerance’ contributes towards the white liberal discourse
sustaining its dominance. Neither the category of those who have the power
to tolerate nor the subjects of their’ tolerance’ are fixed. Each are sites of
struggle between competing groups
.
•
Understanding which groups have the power to be tolerant or
intolerant is central to understanding how the white liberal discourse
retains its dominance.