Xenophobia, the State, and Capitalism

Author(s): Karen Brodkin

Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Nov., 2005), pp. 519-520
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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KARENBRODKIN
Universityof California,Los Angeles

Xenophobia,ffie

COMMEN TA RY

state,

and

capitalism

In

a world where racism and xenophobia seem to be everywhere,it is

important for anthropologiststo explain them, to challenge a pervasive sense that they are somehow a universaland inevitablepart of the
human condition. Matti Bunzl (this issue) has made an important
contribution by historicizing European anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, showing that these are neither timeless nor constant in form. Their
beginnings, ends, waxing and waning in virulence,and changes in nature,he
argues,have been produced by changes in the natureof Europeanstate (and
suprastate)projects. Below, I add another point to his argument about why
racist xenophobic panics resonate as broadly as they do in today's world:
namely, that capitalism's (and state) organizationof work and social space
creates foundations on which states erect or reconfigure particularethnocentrisms into xenophobias and organizedviolence.
Bunzl argues persuasively that anti-Semitism in Europe today differs
from the old, l9th-century form, which was part of European nationbuilding projects that cast Jews as dangerous and unassimilable Others.
Islamophobia operates in the context of building the European Union,
and the state forces promoting it are not very different from those that
generated virulent anti-Semitism. Middle Easterners and North Africans
have replaced Jews as the unassimilable Othersin the political and cultural
landscape of the multistate project of creating a supranational European
Union. As this is happening, Jews are being embraced as models of the kind
of citizen the European Union wishes for, able to be at once Jewish and
European,just as, for example, the French are being asked to be at once
French and European. In this respect, European Jews have become whitened not so differentlyfrom U.S. Jews after WorldWar II (Brodkin2000).
Personalbigotry and violence are not the same as bigotry and violence
that are institutionalized in public or religious policy, discourse, and practice. Today's anti-Semitism in Europe (and the United States) differs from
earlier anti-Semitism in that it is not institutionalized. Its violence is more
personal than church- or state-supported violence, manifested in hate
crimes in which individuals or small groups attack individual Jews or

AMERICANETHNOLOGIST,
Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 519-520, ISSN0094-0496,electronic
ISSN 1548-1425.C)2005 by the ArnericanAnthropologicalAssociation.All rights reserved.
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American Ethnologist

* Volume32 Number4 November2005

visibly Jewish symbols. Bunzl suggests that, although farright,white Europeansmay be perpetratorsof anti-Semitic
acts, more significant are Muslims who see Jews as allied with Israel, which they, in turn, link to Europe's continuing efforts to colonize the Muslim world and destroy
its civilization.
ConservativeJewish organizations give this view traction, especially in the United States. These groups are a
powerful lobby and fund-raiser for Israel and strong supporters of the Bush administration's imperial policies in
the Middle East. They are also the main proponents of the
claim that anti-Semitism, especially by Muslims, is growing, and in the United States, at least, they are prominent
among the forces promoting Islamophobia.
The United States joins European states in transforming unorganized prejudices against Middle Easternersinto
systematic state-sanctioned systems of discrimination including public discourses of Muslims as antithetical to
Europeancivilization.This institutionalizationis embedded
in recent U.S. public policies, like the post-September 11,
2001, wholesale registration, detentions, and arrests of
men of Middle Easterndescent, and in Europe in increasing immigration restriction and anti-immigrant official
public discourse.
At this point, as anthropologists,we have to ask, even
if Islamophobia, like early 20th-century European antiSemitism, is state supported, what in the daily life of nonMuslim Europeans might make them inclined to direct
anger against Muslims and to encourage state persecution
of them? If we do not explain popular support for xenophobic policies independently of state promotion of them,
then xenophobia becomes naturalizedand the explanation
of itself:It is alwaysthere, it just needs encouragement.
In the United States, and in the global economy, more
broadly, racism's resonance rests on institutionalized and
persistent racial and ethnic segregation in the labor force,
in neighborhoods,and in public space (Brodkin2000). This
segregation of some into the worst jobs, schools, and
neighborhoods is the foundation for institutionalized
racializationprojects, whereby new groups of immigrants
become racial Others. White Americans have limited interaction with new immigrants and experience them as
a shadowy population of aliens. The Bush administration
has rivaled European governments in Islamophobic state
policies and discourse, yet Muslims are not the primary
focus of popular xenophobia in the United States. Certainly, a virulent niche market exists for Islamophobia
in the United States among an unsavory coalition of
the political and religious Right, including a Jewish
Right. Still, many more Americans stereotype Mexican

and Central Arnerican immigrants for talcing U.S. jobs

and taking advantage of U.S. public services, in much
the same way that Western Europeans blame Turks and
other Muslims.
I suspect that popular resonance of state-promoted
Islamophobia in Western Europe rests on earlier decades
of immigration of workers from the Middle East. Much
of the working class for Europe's post-World War II
rebuilding and reindustrializationcame from Turkey and
former North Africancolonies. These "guest workers,"like
undocumented immigrants in the United States, were
vulnerable to exploitation because of state-imposed restrictions on work allowed and conditions of residence,
more generally. To better understand why Islamophobia
strikes a popular chord in Europe today, one might ask
about the ethnic composition of the late 20th-century
European working class, about the patterns of occupational and residential segregation, about state policies
toward immigrant worlQers,and about whether unions
and progressive political forces represented their interests
in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Was there a discourse
of domestic antiracism on the European left? Anti-guest
worker sentiments may well have been antecedents and
foundations of today's discourses about "unassimilable"
Muslims destroying European civilization. The particular
hostility toward Turkey and Islam extends outward to
"the Balkans"and is part of a longer pattern in prosperous
northern and western Europe that views its southern and
eastern neighbors, who come as job seekers more than
as investors, as unassimilable Others. In other words, to
Bunzl's argument about the role of the state-superstate, I
would add that anthropologists seeking to understand
the bases of widespread embrace or not of racist policies also look to the ways capitalism joins governments in
organizing the daily life of work and social space.
[xenophobia,nationalism, ethnic segregation,capitalism
and immigration]

Reference cited
Brodkin,Karen
2000 GlobalCapitalism:What'sRace Got to Do with It?American Ethnologist27(2):237-256.
KarenBrodkin
Department of Anthropology
Universityof California,Los Angeles
341 Haines Hall Box 951553
Los Angeles, CA90095-1553
kbrodkin@anthro.ucla.edu

520

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