Stoppi (de)press

Gavan Titley

The European elections showcased many emerging right-wing parties on a wider stage for the first time, among them the True Finns. The True Finns party are one of those political entities that spend their time making racist arguments, but are very sensitive to the charge of racism. More often than not, public engagement with them in Finland is very accomodating of this sensitivity.

Their new MEP and party leader, Timo Soini – who polled a record-breaking 130,000 votes in Finland’s nationwide poll – regularly reminds the public that as he converted to Catholicism when backpacking in Ireland, he is actually a minority. Just in case this needs spelling out, that means that to criticise him for racism would be…

You can hear Arjun Appadurai’s keynote speech at the Beyond Multiculturalism Conference recently held in Berlin and reviewed below by Maria Stehle here:

http://www.esnips.com/web/ButlerandSpivakBerlin2009/

Thanks to Counterrealism for this: http://counterrealism.wordpress.com/

Nick Cohen, who Arun Kundnani writes about in his article for the Questioning the European ‘Crisis of Multiculturalism’ special issue (out in early 2011, abstracts on this site) has written a reactionary article in today’s Observer(http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/14/james-von-brunn-far-right) in which he manages to put together last week’s Holocaust Museum shooting and radical anti-Zionist jazz musician Gila’ad Atzmon. The best commentary following the article read “If you don’t subscribe to the neo con agenda you’re an evil smelly Nazi. Even if you vote Labour.
Personally I believe that the real unspoken alliance is between the Zionist right and white Islamophobes.”

Germany Beyond Multiculturalism?

by Maria Stehle

A report on the International Conference on “Envisioning the Immigration Society” (“Fragen an die Einwanderungsgesellschaft”) at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW, House of World Cultures) in Berlin, June 2009.

Let me start this reflection with a short disclaimer: I only attended two of the panels at this conference. My reflections are not an exhaustive account of the discussions at the conference but rather my thoughts on the two (very different) events that I attended and on some of the questions that emerged for me.

On the first page of the conference program a quote by David Hollinger, historian from UC Berkeley, asks the questions: “ Just who belongs together with whom, and for what purposes, and on what authority?” The short description of the program of the conference starts with an often cited dichotomy: “globalization versus nation.” This dichotomy is introduced as a tension.

The BNP’s success reflects the new racism of our political culture

BNP leader Nick Griffin is pelted with eggs by anti-fascists

By Arun Kundnani

from the Institute of Race Relations website

The election of two British National Party MEPs owes as much to new forms of racism in mainstream politics as to alienation from the Labour Party. Over the last few years, much of liberal England has given up on the idea that racism is a significant social problem. Instead the real problem is taken to be social fragmentation exacerbated by multiculturalism. For every mention of institutional racism, we have heard a thousand references to the ‘crisis of multiculturalism’, ‘Muslim self-segregation’ and the need for ‘integration’. Hence the official bodies established to tackle racism, however ineffectually, have been dismantled: the Commission for Racial Equality has been subsumed into a more nebulous Equality and Human Rights Commission, local racial equality councils have been pressured into reinventing themselves as promoters of assimilation and community-based anti-racist organisations have had their funding removed on the grounds that they cater exclusively to the needs of minority groups. Defending these trends, figures such as Trevor Phillips have argued that the real issue is not racism but ‘separatism’ and the solution is the imposition of a cohesive British national identity.

Read on…