Postmodern Racism

In order to elaborate a possible connection between emergence of neo-racism and the specific political situations and social transformations - liberal hegemony, postmodern multiculturalism - forming their background, I will appropriate some of the central concepts to be found in Etienne Balibar's and Slavoj Zizek's writings on the constellation of liberal-democratic hegemony, racism and postmodern multiculturalism for a reading of Austrian right-wing populism which has become something of a negative common denominator for the anti-fascist consensus in Europe after World War II as well as for the justification of liberal hegemony.

1. Balibar on Racism and the Austrian example:

According to Balibar, the establishment of the liberal-democratic hegemony characterizing most Europeans countries makes it necessary to re-think the traditional understanding of racism. Neo-racism could be described as "racism without race": "a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but 'only' the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions. (Balibar) One clear variation on this differentialist racism can be found in the FPö's ideological reconstruction of (Central) Europe in terms of a Central Europe of regions and "Heimaten". Its program of a new European regionalism with emphasis on regional, cultural and ethnic differentiation is formulated as "national-revolutionary ethnopluralism" against "ethnomorphosis" and the loss of German national identity. Andreas Mölzer, the chief ideologue of the FPö, writes:

Central Europe as melting-pot, an ethnic and cultural leveling of Europe, would result in one of the greatest cultural losses in modern history. And if Germany in its European central position developed into a melting-pot of different peoples and cultures, the rest of Central Europe would not be able to succumb to a similar tendency. The 'melting-pot' Central Europe would have become sad reality." (227)

Thus, Mölzer advocates a differentiation and "deepening" of the nation in terms of German "Volkskultur", which is based on a classification that allows to reflect upon the difference that constitutes the German people - his term is "Stammbevölkerung" - and to search for the criteria by which German can be said to be 'Germans'. This is then one of his catalogue of values defining German identity: "Diligence, productivity, faithfulness to one's Heimat, sense of family, a declaration for the military, patriotism, a declaration for the national character, and historical consciousness. (175)
Mölzer's discourse no longer seeks recourse to race as an isolable biological unit; instead it refers to the cultural-national element forming the central factor for the constitution of identity. In short, being German is the result of belonging to German "culture".
What makes this differentialist doctrine aiming at the preservation of one's tradition and identity possible, is a naturalization of culture insofar as it depicts cultural difference as "natural milieu". It emphasizes the cultural differences, alienates them into natural and ontological relations and then proceeds to explain racism as "natural reaction" to the abolition of distances among cultures:

Political radicalization on both sides is a necessary consequence. It goes without saying that there will be annoyance on the side of the Stammbevölkerung; and the response of the immigrant groups will be an insistence on their own identity; thus, aggression will be rising as well as mutual rejection. (220)

The argument according to which individuals are the exclusive heirs and bearers of a single culture, draws upon anthropological universals such as the notion of "cultural tradition", "cultural heritage", "cultural rootedness" or "ecology" as preconditions for the preservation of the "natural milieu" of the human race. Mölzer claims that the struggle for national identity touches upon biological problems, since the spiritual-cultural identity of the nation is impossible without the corresponding natural "Lebensraum": the ecological question becomes the primary task of national politics. However, how does this meta-racism conceptualize the Other: the immigrant who "today is no longer a cultural and biological relative"? A possible response to this question is opened up by Balibar's claim that the prototype of a racism that does not have the pseudo-biological concept of race as its main driving force is "anti-Semitism ... which is already a 'culturalist' racism." That is, the pervasiveness of a self-reflective, cultural racism is to be grasped in terms of the specter of anti-Semitism kept alive by the Holocaust encrypted in many European nationalist narratives. Balibar goes on to maintain that the "new" differentialist racism is a "generalized anti-Semitism". And this has consequences for the traditional relationship between nationalism and racism: "You need more nationalism. You need a nationalism, which is, so to speak, more nationalistic than nationalism itself: what I would call in the language of Bataille an excess of nationalism, or in the language of Derrida a supplement of nationalism within nationalism itself." This "super-nationalism" not only always includes claims for annexation to the national body of "lost" individuals and populations - and Mölzer's discourse, his appeal to a reconstruction of Central Europe under German heading, is the variation on those panic developments of nationalism striving for racial or cultural purity -, but it also transforms into a supra-nationalism that "tends to idealize timeless or transhistorical communities." (Balibar) One implication of this excess of racism over nationalism is that racism no longer serves as a secondary formation against the background of the assertion of national identity. Rather, nationalism itself begins to function as a species or a supplement to racism, as a continually displaced delimitation from the always already "internal" foreign body. The counterpart to this displacement within racism is the structural change in the role of anti-Semitism: that is, anti-Semitism is no longer the exception, but the universalized attitude that conceives each ethnic alterity as uncanny figure threatening one's own culture.
Let us begin to re-mark the subjective position of the FPö by articulating the network of symbolic over-determination that is has produced. Its populist nationalist project combines in a postmodern manner a host of heterogeneous elements - such as fundamentalism, right-wing populism, bourgeois liberalism, corporate vision of society, authoritarian modernization of capitalism, ecology, technocracy, christological elements, martyrdom, patriarchal metaphorics etc. - that, since they no longer belong to a fixed ideology, can be re-articulated into a new meaning. (Laclau and Mouffe)
It is the "immigrant" that occupies the position of the master signifier suturing the disparate elements of the FPö's racist discourse. The "immigrant" as the condensation of a series of economic, political, sexual, and moral antagonisms - "dirty, lazy, violent, primitive, rapacious, profiteering" etc - is, according to Zizek, not merely a projection and an externalization of some inner conflict pertaining to the racist subject: one has also to recognize the inversion at work in the self-enclosed strategy of racism. Only then will it become apparent that racism and its construction of the "immigrant-Other" revolves around what Zizek calls the "nation-Thing".

2. Zizek and the racist fantasy

National identification is by definition sustained by a relationship toward the nation as Thing. This nation-Thing is determined by a series of contradictory properties. It appears to us as "our thing", as something accessible only to "us", as something that the others cannot grasp. It appears as what gives plenitude and vivacity to our life, and yet, the only way we can determine it is by resorting to different versions of the same tautology. In short, all we can do is enumerate disconnected fragments of the way our community organizes its jouissance.
As Zizek points out, the nation-Thing is never simply an accumulation of features; there is something more in it, something that is present in these features that appears through them. And it appears through them by means of the paradoxical reflective structure of the very community believing in it. Thus, the nation-Thing as the Cause is produced by ideological practices; however, the national Cause cannot be reduced to a pure discursive effect; what has to be added is jouissance. A nation exists only as long as its specific jouissance continues to be materialized in a set of social practices and transmitted through national myths that structure those practices. (Zizek)
Here one can also see how the condensation of the "immigrant-Other" in the racist discourse of the FPö functions as a support for a displacement that enables it to transpose social antagonisms inherent in capitalism onto the antagonism between the totalized, organic and harmonious unity of Austria and the Other as its corrupting force. Thus, it is not Austrian society itself that is marked by antagonisms - the source of corruption is located rather in a particular entity, the spectral presence of the "immigrant" who becomes now legible as a symptom, a disfigured and displaced representation, the repressed real, of the social antagonisms inherent in Austrian society.
The "immigrant-Other" captures the desire of racism and the framework structuring racist jouissance has to be understood as "fantasy that is basically a scenario filling out the empty space of a void." A fantasy that imputes the "immigrant-Other" an excessive enjoyment: "he wants to steal our enjoyment and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment". (Zizek) No matter what the Other does, we are disturbed by the fact that the Other is Other and that she has her own customs. As Jacques-Alain Miller remarks:

Why does the Other remain Other? What is the cause for our hatred of him, for our hatred of him in his very being? It is hatred of the enjoyment in the Other. This would be the most general formula of the modern racism that we are witnessing today: a hatred of the particular way the Other enjoys. ... The question of tolerance or intolerance is not at all concerned with the subject of science and its human rights. It is located on the level of tolerance or intolerance toward the enjoyment of the Other, the Other as he who essentially steals my own enjoyment. We know, of course, that the fundamental status of the object is to be always snatched away by the Other. It is precisely this theft of enjoyment that we write down in shorthand as minus Phi, the mathem of castration. The problem is apparently unsolvable as the Other is the Other in my interior. The root of fascism is thus hatred of my own enjoyment. There is no other enjoyment but my own. If the Other is in me, occupying the place of extimacy, then the hatred is also my own. (Miller)

According to Zizek, the following two aspects are concealed by imputing to the Other the "theft of enjoyment": first, that the Other who steals our enjoyment is always the Other in our own interiority: that is, the racist denies the notion of difference as symbolic difference splitting all subjects, making all subjects split subjects experiencing a lack, even if they do not want to perceive it. For the differences racists constantly are talking about are imaginary, reified differences dissimulating the universality and the individuality of subjects in favor of particularisms.
The second aspect is that the racist "we" never possessed what was allegedly stolen from it. Austrian authoritarian populism has produced a whole mythology about the struggle against external and internal enemies. The primary enemies are the immigrants, who are perceived as threatening to steal Austrian land and culture. The secondary enemy is an alienated bureaucracy (EU and the "Establishment") which threatens the power of the people: alienated from the nation, it is said to be devouring the Austrian nationals identity from within.
The ideological fantasy of racism functions in terms of a transcendental schematism constituting desire and providing it with co-ordinates (Adorno/Horkheimer) by mediating between the formal symbolic structure and the positivity of objects encountered in reality. Fantasy also enacts a narrative occulting some repressed antagonism - that is, it generates a phantasmic loop, the regressive and interminable search for the phantasmic point at which Austrian history "took the wrong turn" so as to recapture the stolen, forgotten part. And this phantasmic point reveals itself - in Mölzer's texts - again and again as identification with the "trans-national idea of Reich":

The way towards a German confederation, towards a loose, but all the more fraternal confederation of states in Central Europe as part of a Europe growing together, offered the opportunity to take recourse to a line of tradition of German-Central European history which was interrupted in 1806 and in 1866: the trans-national idea of Reich. (Mölzer)

This idea of the Holy Roman Empire of German nation as organic solidarity becomes the ultimate foundation for a certain imagined national space in which, in the name of a particular ethnos, both the individual and the collective are substantially embodied. And although Mölzer mentions more contemporary versions of a confederation such as the Habsburg monarchy and the Swiss confederation, they ultimately can be traced back to revivals of the Holy Roman Empire - again - of German nation. Since the Austro-German nation is in many respects "the most European nation",

the new Germany will be referred back again to its classic, occidental role: mediator of western culture, political protector and economic patron to the nations of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. For the Croats, Slovaks, Hungary, Rumania, Ukrainians and Russians, the way back into the occident will be via Germany. (Mölzer)

Furthermore, the gap between this ontopology of the Austro-German nation, this "axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present-being [on] to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general",(Derrida) on the one hand, and the capitalist society split by antagonistic struggles on the other hand, is filled up by the "immigrant-Other", that, not surprisingly, in addition of being an immigrant, displays all the features of the anti-Semitic features of the Jew. The immigrant-Other is that spectral appearance supposed to fill up the hole in Austrian society so that the latter can constitute itself as harmonious German Volksgemeinschaft. Thus, it is this organic Austro-German nation, that the Austrian racist hopes to win over to his side. It is this Other that is supposed to assign to himself his proper place, to essentialize his being in terms of a definition of a privileged, distinctive and unified ethnos. And this auto-referential interpellation of the Austrian racist is conditional upon the hetero-referential interpellation of the immigration-Other.

3. The multicultural gaze of the European Community:

However, Zizek's political reading of the Lacanian notions of Thing, jouissance and fantasy enables us not only to account for Austrian racism, but also for the role the European Community played in it. For was the gaze of the European community, which presented itself in terms of liberal multiculturalism, not included from the very beginning, so as to allow for the concealment of the antagonisms inherent to Western liberal democracy?
Recall that most commentaries on the FPö in the international press were either alarmist or terribly condescending: the success of the FPö was seen either as a new wave of European fascism or as the simple consequence of the fact that Austria had never really been de-nazified. Apart from the fact that history was set up here as a diagnosis of the normal and the pathological and thus ended up echoing the discourse of its own object, demonizing Haider as Hitler's revenant who himself demonized his enemies and victims, this reduction of the FPö to a mere variant of nazism operated a logic of in-differentiation that neutralized and de-politicized the essentially political character of the Austrian conflict and turned it into an ethnic issue. In other words, the "innocent and multicultural" gaze of the European Community (the "three wise men") not only concealed an impossible gaze of someone who falsely exempted himself from his actual involvement in the conflict played out in Austria, but it also was a quasi-anthropological gaze that was looking in Austria for the reality of right populism, putting in on stage, so that it could serve as a useful reference point within and as a reservoir for the theater of European multicultural values. That is, Austria became the privileged object of the European Community's phantasmatic cathexis: for the refined, tolerant Europe, Austria was the exotic land with refreshingly folkloric and cultural variety and the site where it encountered "new Nazi barbarism". Take, for instance, Bernhard-Henri Lévy's quasi-anthropological description of Austria giving his audience lessons on the historical, ethnic, religious and cultural contexts of the conflict. (Lévy)
What is more, Lévy's report on the political activities in Austria displayed all the characteristics of today's post-political suspension of the political: his account of the demonstrations at the Heldenplatz was nothing but an assertion of the plural contingency of postmodern political struggles:

The demonstrations called by e-mails and handys. The lack of hierarchy. ... The city as theater. The urban landscape as excellent manoeuvre area. Radicalism for the days of the internet and the 'new economy'. Postmodernism and perhaps post-political politics. ... These young people are at the origin of a form of struggle, ... that will allow for the substitutions of the great radical left narratives of the past century. (Lévy)

Moreover, the following passage from Lévy's text provided for the identification with the "voices of the Other Austria":

I had expected everything but not that. There are 300000 Viennese who know French ... There are 300000 Austrians who, distancing themselves from each Austrian or German chauvinism, are deeply linked to a France that, as I found out later, showed legendary characteristics: Résistance, first Gaullism, 1789, May 68, human rights. ... There was a thermometer that the world seemed to have forgotten and that I discovered at the Heldenplatz during that evening: that of a fortunate, glorious, offensive francophiles. (Lévy)

Does this passage not confirm Zizek's thesis that identification is always already identification with the ego-ideal? What Lévy (and the European Community) actually identify with, when they observe images from the conflicts in Austria, are not the groups involved in that struggle, but the point of view from which they can appear likeable to themselves. When Lévy sees the picture of the demonstrations at the Heldenplatz, he perceives it in a symbolic space in which he is the actor - he is the one who is concerned. Lévy's "concern" for Austria allowed him to perceive himself in the form that he found likeable: the political struggle in Austria was presented so that he liked to see himself in the position from which he stared at the former and from which he, together with all mankind, was moved by the fact that he was concerned.

Some remarks on the relationship between racism, multiculturalism and postmodernism:

The fantasy which organized the perception of Austria as that of the Other of the European community reveals itself, in the final analysis, as Europe itself in its Otherness, the screen on which Europe has projected its own repressed reverse. And it is the supposedly liberal-democratic framework with its post-political procedure of negotiation and multiculturalist policing asserting each particular identity and its proper place within the social structure that produces nationalist and racist closure as its inherent opposite.
And would one not have to say that Austria could almost be seen as the demystifying tool of this phantom Europe. In carrying out strictest anti-immigration policies, the Austrians are Europe's cutting edge.

One should not forget that the Schengen agreement was not an invention of xenophobic circles in Austria, but it was rather the price demanded by the European Community for Austria's entry into the European Community. This agreement denigrated Austria to being the guardian of the Community. ... The enlightened strategists of the European Union would have liked to see Austria to carry out its task more efficiently.... (Gauß)

The 'real' Europe in the making is a white Europe, a bleached Europe that is morally, economically, and ethnically integrated and purified. In Austria, this Europe is victoriously in the making. In a sense, what is happening here is a logical and ascending phase of the New European Order, itself a branch of the New World Order, whose global characteristic is Capital, white fundamentalism, protectionism, discrimination, and control. By denouncing Haider as proto-Nazi, we pride ourselves for having put our finger on this evil, without questioning the innocence of our liberal-democratic intentions. With good reason, since we are fighting the same enemies: immigrants. Thus, the liberal opposition between 'open' pluralist and multicultural societies and 'closed' nationalist societies founded upon the exclusion of the Other has to be brought to its point of self-reference: the liberal, postmodern, multicultural gaze itself functions according to the same logic, insofar as it is founded upon the exclusion of the Other to whom one attributes fundamentalist nationalism etc. Moreover, both represent a "racism with a distance" that does not disturb the smooth circulation of capital. Here one will have to re-introduce the reference to capitalism as the very terrain for the emergence of postmodern racism. (Zizek)