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This article was downloaded by: [Deakin University Library]On: 17 October 2014, At: 07:00Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,London W1T 3JH, UK
Journal of Ethnic and
Migration StudiesPublication details, including instructions for
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Crises of national identityas the ‘new moral panics’:
Political agenda‐setting about
definitions of nationhoodChristopher T. Husbands
a
a Reader in Sociology and Internal Academic
Audit Officer , London School of Economics andPolitical Science , United Kingdom
Published online: 30 Jun 2010.
To cite this article: Christopher T. Husbands (1994) Crises of national identity
as the ‘new moral panics’: Political agenda‐setting about definitions of
nationhood , Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 20:2, 191-206, DOI:
10.1080/1369183X.1994.9976419
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w community 20(2): 19 1-2 06 January 1994
Crises of national identity as the 'new moral
panics': Political agenda-setting about definitions
of nationhood
1
Christopher T. Husbands
Abstract During the past decade there has been a heightened
concern about national identity and definitions of nationhood
in a number of west European countries. Such a concern has
had varying content in different countries but has been
universally based upon the supposed threat posed by various
types of immigrant or foreigner. These fears, often created
and stimulated by mass-media treatment, have features of a
'moral panic', a concept used initially by sociologists of
deviance. Examples are considered using recent episodes and
occurrences in Great Britain, the Federal Republic of
Germany and The Netherlands. These new moral panics
may be decomposed into specific elements, based especially
upon fears about numbers and of cultural dilution or threat.
It is suggested that such panics derive particular sustenance
from the anxieties and uncertainties held by many
indigenous people in western Europe about whether their
own national identity does have sufficient resilience and
adaptive capacity to survive intact when facing an
economically inhospitable future and a geopolitical moral
vacuum.
During the 1980s and 1990s a number of factors emerged in various countries
of western Europe to raise anew questions about the mean ings of national identity.
The finally acknowledged presence of settled immigrant populations (as opposed
to transient-worker populations), the arrival in western Europe of large numbers
of asylum-seekers from southern and eastern Europe and from the Third World
and, most recently, debates in the countries of the European Community about
some of the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty have been among the most
significant factors that have fuelled controversies about national identity. Such
'crises' have often taken the form of fears of 'excessive' multi-culturalism or of
cultural 'dilution'.
2
Even in west European countries where it had previously been thought that
such issues were fully settled in earlier decades, there has been a renewal of such
deba tes. In Great Britain during th e 1970s there had been a debate about national
identity that had been stimulated by populist fears about 'swam ping' and cultural
dilution. This anxiety evaporated in the early 1980s after further restrictionist
immigration legislation by the then-new Conservative government; however, it
has been renewed in the past couple of years through media-inspired fears
occasioned by increasing num bers of asylum-seekers and, most recently in a section
Christopher T. Husbands is Reader in Sociology and Internal Academic Audit Officer
at the London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom.
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192 Christopher Husba nds
of the right, by suspicions about closer political contact with Europe. In The
Netherlands it was once conventional wisdom that the country had resolved any
issues of national identity by self-consciously adopting policies of multi-culturalism
towards the country's settled ethnic minorities. However, in the last year or so
there has been an effervescence of renewed concern that has focused in particula r
on Muslim assimilability, stimulated in part by forthright statements from the
leader of the liberal-right
Volkspartij voor V rijheid en Dém ocratie
( W D ) , F rits
Bolkestein. In F rance throug hout the 1980s there has been a cycle of concern about
national identity, particularly as precipitated by imm igration-related eve nts. T he
early success of the F ront National (FN ) in the mid-1980s produced debates about
the extent of illegal imm igration, and abo ut nationality and citizenship. T he issue
then ebbed and flowed on the coun try's political agenda, stimulated by such matters
as the
foulards
affair' in 1989 and the more recent pronouncem ents of certain right-
wing politicians (Husbands 1991; 1992), until the electoral victory of the right
in the March 1993 National Assembly elections; the new right-wing governm ent,
with Charles Pasqua as Minister of the Interior, has put these matters centrally
on to the agenda with its restrictive initiatives on immigration, citizenship, the
right of abode in France and political asylum all intended to convey the message
that France no longer wants to be.a country of immigration. In the Federal Republic
of Germany the well-understood verities about German identity, long enshrined
in the Basic Law, were subjected to a number of rebuffs during the 1980s. The
emergence of a politically viable extreme right, the arrival of increasing numbers
of asylum-seekers and the debate about changing the relevant provision of the Basic
Law, the arrival too of difficult-to-assimilate Aussiedler an d Übersiedler,
1
and
finally the disappointments of German unification after the initial euphoria, all
these fuelled a debate about what it meant to be German.
Crises of national identity and the concept of 'moral panic'
Heightened concerns about national identity, which are often associated with
unsavoury popu list appeals, speeches and statements by politicians and by the mass
media, can be analysed using the concept of 'moral panic'. This term was
introduced by Stanley Cohen (1972: esp. 191-98) to characterise a situation of
over-reaction by the pub lic, stimulated by deliberately alarmist and dubious media
repo rting, to a relatively m und ane set of incidents, so tha t a particu lar identifiable
phenomenon is created w hich may serve as a symbol against which public hostility
is directed . T he concept implies an element of irrationality in the p ublic's reaction
and contains also a self-fulfilling aspect. Crime trends (or particular types of crim e,
such as physical assault in the pursuan ce of robb ery), d rug use , and exotic yo uth
cultures have usually been the objects of moral panics, bu t it is perfectly appropriate
to analyse sensitivities about national identity with the same approach. Cohen,
of course, had introduced the term to describe the delirious responses to the
emergence of early-1960s youth movements in Great Britain, which were reported
by the mass media in exaggerated tones implying criminality and excess. Perhaps
even more famously, Hall and his colleagues described the engendering of lurid
images about so-called 'mugging' as part of a larger panic about alleged increases
in violent crime (Hall et al. 1978: esp. 3-28).
4
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Crises of national identity 193
Anxieties about national identity do have analogous features. They may be crises
in the sense that in many cases they show a sudden eruptibility, often in response
to a precipitating event, although the causes of the purported concern may long
have been latent. They are not necessarily related to the fundamentals of how
citizens of a particular co untry define the ir nationhood : advanced co untries with
very different approaches to this m atter may alike be subject to these new moral
pan ics. Such panics, like the earlier examples of comparable phenom ena described
by Cohen and by Hall and his colleagues, are at first creations of the media,
particularly but far from exclusively the mass print media. Indicators that a country
is in the grip of such a panic are varied: some are straightforwardly deducible from
monitoring mass-media coverage; others are the emergence of particular issues
on to th e political agenda, including issues that political parties are using to encroach
upon the voting support of their rivals; others are heightened public awareness,
as measured for exam ple by regular polling data, of the 'difference' of certain social
groups (in this case, ethnic group s), that they or arrivals in the coun try from their
membership group are a 'problem', or that they should be encouraged to leave
(if not necessarily forced to do so). T hu s, a subtext in m oral panics abo ut national
identity is almost invariably ethnic exclusionism.
Th is article seeks to analyse the new m oral panics in terms of a select nu m ber
of recent or contemporary examples taken from three west European countries,
although analogous phenom ena from other coun tries are referred to elsewhere in
the article:
5
• Great Britain , focusing on the Salman Ru shdie affair and the Muslim
community;
• the Fede ral Repu blic of Ge rm any, focusing on the debate about the asylum
issue; and
• Th e Nethe rlan ds, focusing on recent argum ents about M uslim assimilability
and on the concern about illegal immigrants.
Great Britain: troubled sensitivities about the Muslim community
Both public and government were taken by surprise that a hitherto largely silent
religious minority reacted so violently to Salman Rush die's
The Satanic Verses
(see
Modood 1992: 69-78). The incidents of the affair, as it unfolded, revealed that
there was little wider tolerance for this new assertiveness in the M uslim population
of the country. As the liberal-minded Financial Times said in an editorial (25
February 1989: 6) , 'If the initial protestors had used only a little forethought, they
would have realised that w hat they were doing was profoundly against the
traditions
of the country in which they live. W e do not burn books, even symbolically'
[emphases added]. The public declarations by some Islamic militants of their
approval of Ayatollah Khomeini's
fatwa
delivered on 14 February 1989, indeed
their w illingness to carry it out personally if given an o pportun ity to do so, enraged
many in the indigenous population. To those on the political right, it vindicated
a long-standing hostility to Britain 's being conceived as a multi-cultural cou ntry ,
allegedly bringing into sharp focus the fact that at least one of its minorities was
aggressively unassimilable. A Lon don march on Saturday 27 May 1989 to dem and
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194 Christopher Hu sbands
banning of the book attracted 20,000 or so participants bu t violent clashes between
stone-throwing militants and the police led to 101 arrests and 18 injured policeman,
rather a high ra te for w hat was a relatively small num ber of demo nstrators
(Daily
Telegraph,
29 May 1989: 2). Th is event in particu lar was used to justify suspicions
about the 'Britishness' of the cou ntry's M uslim population. Fo r example, Sir John
Stokes, then the well-known 72-year-old right-wing Conservative Member of
Parliament for Halesowen and S tourbridge in the W est Midlands, said: 'T he British
public will not stand for this disgraceful behaviour. Those who settle here must
obey our laws and custo m s'. A later, smaller march in Bradford on 17 Jun e 1989
led to 54 arrests, when a hitherto fairly peaceful occasion ended with a siege of
the central police station after the arrest of two marchers.
Another line of attack on the book from within Britain's Muslim community
had been a legal one under the blasphemy laws. Although proponents of prosecution
for blasphemy did w in a legal review of wh ether th e boo k's au thor and p ublishers
should be prosecuted on these grounds, the Home Office refused in July 1989
to consider extending the blasphemy laws to cover religions other than Christianity,
although such a move was apparently seriously considered but then rejected by
the Church of England
{The Independent, 2
August 1989: 2). It was argued by
the Home Office that there would be practical problems in guaranteeing equal
treatme nt to such a course bu t, equally, there m ust also have been some concern
about giving an 'a lien ' religion the same status as Christianity, since an alternative
suggestion to abolish the offence of blasphemy altogether was not pursu ed. A group
calling itself the British Muslim Action Front, convened by Abdal Choudhury,
finally failed before three Divisional Court judges in May 1990 in its attempt to
have The Satanic Verses prosecuted under the blasphemy laws; they upheld an
earlier decision of the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate that the common law of
blasphemy protected only Christianity and they denied leave to appeal to the H ouse
of Lords.
The founding of the Islamic Party of Britain in September 1989 was seen at
the time as being nearly equally threatening, although the party was dominated
by European converts and has been almost wholly unsuccessful in its political aims.
In the April 1992 general election it fought a handful of seats and was wholly
unimpressive, even where it might have been expected to make an impact. In
Bradford N or th constituency it won 0.6 per cent of votes cast, in Bradford South
0.3 per cent, and in Bradford West 1.0 per cent.
However, such unobtrusiveness has not been universal. Recently increasing
assertiveness by Muslim m ilitants in a num ber of spheres has been reacted to with
no little ambiguity by the British state and th e British public. T he establishment
of a self-styled Muslim Parliament, which first convened on 4 January 1992,
received a very cool reception from non-M uslims, partly because it was an idea
of Dr Kaum Siddiqui, head of the pro-Iranian Muslim In stitute, who had made
a number of statements supporting the anti-Rushdie
fatwa
and had escaped
prosecution. Despite some apparent hesitations, calls for public funding of a
separate M uslim school system were also treated w ith suspicion and have recently
been finally rejected by the British governm ent, one Minister having earlier argued
in effect
(Daily Telegraph,
6 January 1992: 4) that the precondition for any
religiously run school being granted voluntary-aided status (and thus receiving
financia l support from the government) was compliance with the Education Reform
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Crises of national identity 195
Act 1988, which prescribes that pupils at a maintained school should take part
in a daily act of collective worship that is wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian
character (Parker-Jenkins 1991). Although individual Muslim children in
conventional maintained schools may be withdrawn by their parents from such
acts of worship , this would self-evidently be a difficult principle to follow, consistent
with the provisions of the 1988 Act, for a wholly non-Christian school.
6
The conservative-minded
Daily
Telegraph was pleased to report a call by the
Speaker of Pakistan's National Assembly that his countrymen in Britain should
integrate, lest Islam came to replace Communism as the main threat perceived
by the West (Daily Telegraph, 30 September 1991: 2).
Federal Republic of Germany: the political-asylum issue
Until its recent revision and modification, Article 16, Para. 2, of the Federal
Republic's Basic Law had succinctly promised that 'the politically persecuted enjoy
the right of asy lum '. Dem ands that this should be amended were not p articularly
new but became more strident throughout the 1980s, as the number of asylum-
seekers increased almost on a year-by-year basis.
Not unexpectedly, among the earliest demands were those from the extreme
right, as an extension of the anti-immigrant strategy started (by the
National-
demokratische Partei Deutschlands (N PD ), for example) in the late 1970s. Certainly,
by 1986 literature from Die Republikaner (RE Ps), to name b ut one source, was
bitterly excoriating
Scheinasylanten
(bogus asylum-seekers); indeed, this particular
neologism may well have been invented by the extreme right. However, the
Bavarian Christlich-Soziale Union (CSU) was almost as quick to demand a restriction
upon the right enshrined in Article 16; one of its one-time leaders, Friedrich
Zimmermann, when Federal Minister of the Interior, had been a particularly
strident early voice. Chancellor Kohl long adopted a diplomatic silence on the
matter but as late as November 1988 he made a speech that was interpreted as
being in opposition to am ending Article 16, although the latter was not apparently
explicitly mentioned.
Chancellor Kohl has said that he is against altering the right of asylum. 'The right
of asylum is not to be at the disposal of political whim', the CDU leader assured
the National Assembly of the Junge Union [the youth wing of the CDU] meeting
at the weekend in Baden-Baden. 'People who are persecuted for political, racist
or religious reasons will continue to find asylum in the Federal Republic. To us
the right of asylum is sacred,' he emphasised to the 300 delegates {Süddeutsche
Zeitung
28 November 1988: 5).
This put him at odds with his own Ministry of the Interior, which at the same
time was repeating its call for a change in A rticle 16, claiming that the then-current
arrangement prevented the expulsion of many rejected asylum-seekers.
Th e rise of the extreme righ t, from January 1989 in particular, was one major
factor in persuading the CDU to change its mind, especially as it thought that
it might be particularly disadvantaged by this development. However, electoral
results in certain places, including the
Deutsche
Volksunion s (DVU) success in
the September 1991 legislative election in Bremen, which was particularly at the
expense of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SP D ), also helped to
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196 Christopher H usban ds
persuade the latter to change its view. Having in early 1992 reluctantly agreed
with the governm ent coalition on the need for accelerated procedures to deal with
asylum-seek ers, it moved in late 1992, un der t he pragm atic direction of its then-
leader, Björn Engholm, and despite considerable internal turmoil and opposition
from a num ber of its regional branche s, to accept a change in the text of Article
16.
The preliminary compromise with the CDU was achieved in December 1992
and, despite more bickering, a common draft for the change to the Basic Law
was agreed on 15 January 1993. The procedures to implement the change were
passed by the Federal Parliament and came into force on 1 July 1993, despite earlier
accusations against the SP D from the CD U of backtracking and stalling — by ,
for example, the latter's parliamentary business leader, Jürgen Rüttgers (Süd-
deutsche Zeitung, 4 February 1993: 2).
During 1992 there were 438,191 applications for political asylum in the Federal
Rep ublic, compared w ith 256,112 in 1991. It is perhaps the S PD 's change of heart
that merits particular focus in a discussion of the implication of this issue for a
moral panic about national identity; it seems that pressure of such numbers
(combined with the
belief
strongly disputed in sections of the party, that a change
in Article 16 and the associated legislation could reduce them ) was a primary force
in the SPD's change of course. However, it is also fair to note that, while the
issue of threatened national identity has been relevant in understand ing the debate,
both the SPD and even sections of the CDU were strongly influenced by more
pragmatic considerations, such as the strains on German infrastructure and the
economic costs of processing and absorption. However, the CSU and certainly
the extreme right were also concerned about cultural dilution.
7
The Netherlands: Muslim assimilability and illegal immigration
Most D utch anxieties about national identity have been expressed in a fairly muted
manner, confined traditionally to such matters as a periodically recurring feeling
of inferiority among some intellectuals about the limited pene tration of the D utch
language and about the fact that little of the worlds great literature has been written
in it. Certainly in recent decades, The Netherlands, perhaps more than any other
European country outside Scandinavia, has offered to many non-Dutch observers
the image of a country content with its own sense of national identity,
self-
confidently absorbing any cultural problems arising from the presence of ethnic
minority populations. The truth, of course, was never really so simple; critics,
both domestic and foreign, have voiced various doubts about its official 'minorities
policy', which has been implemented since 1980. Even so, the Dutch Muslim
com mu nity, containing two of the c oun try's m ost significant m inority gro ups, the
Tu rks and Moroccans, has been more able than its British counterpart to establish
a legitimate presence (Rath, Groenendijk and Penninx 1991).
The issue of Islam and of possible problems of Muslim assimilability arose
explicitly in 1991, although there had long been in public debate an und ertone
of concern about this matter. The issue in Dutch politics has been extended and
has now metamorphosed into the so-called 'national minorities debate', but its
genesis was an explicit concern about Muslims.
On 6 September 1991 Frits Bolkestein, the leader of the Second Chamber
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Crises of national identity 197
parliamentary grou p of the W D , delivered a wide-ranging speech to the
international convocation of liberal parties , the Liberal International Conference,
meeting in Luc erne. H aving talked of refugee pressure from eastern Europ e, he
then immediately continued:
Prominent among recent immigrants in The Netherlands are people from Morocco
and from Turkey. Many of them settled in my country in the sixties when labour
was scarce. These two communities have continued to grow through national
sic)
increase and also because marriage partners are brought in from the countries
of origin.
In a few years' time The Netherlands will harbour some 400,000 moslims.
It is an influx such as we have never before had to absorb. Here I come to the
theme of this congress. What should government policy be towards these people
who come from a different culture and of whom many speak little or no Dutch?
(Bolkestein 1991a)
A week later Bolkestein (1991b) published an article on this aspect of his speech
in the m orning new spaper, D e Volkskrant and h e is generally cred ited with having
unleashed the 'nationa l minorities deb ate '. Indeed, in a widely reported speech
in Amsterdam on 28 September 1992, the Dutch Secretary of State for Justice,
Aad Ko sto, explicitly praised Bolkestein for having made the question of the D utch
non-indigenous population respectably 'discussable' (NRC Handelsblad, 29
September 1992: 7).
Bolkestein's original argument had been that religious differences were the
principal factor behind unassimilability. Among his critics were several who,
recognising that integration of minorities did pose genuine questions, disputed
his singling out Muslims and Islam as factors making accommodation to Dutch
society uniquely difficult (e.g., Pin to 1991). Th e debate broadened as the issues
it touched became more numerous. Others were not concerned merely with the
supposedly problematic nature of Islam.The PvdA Minister of Development
Cooperation, Jan Pronk, did attempt to counter the restrictionist trend by
suggesting several times in late 1992 that The Netherlands should declare itself
a country of immigration, albeit undoubtedly in part as an attempt to shore up
ethnic m inority sup port for the ailing PvdA . How ever, this proposal raised gasps
of anxiety in o ther political quarters, where it was felt that it would give to foreigners
exactly the opposite message to that which they ought to be receiving. For example,
th e Christen Democratisch Appel (CDA) leader, Elco Brinkman, felt that this would
give 'false expectations'
(NRC Handelsblad,
17 Novem ber 1992: 3).
Examples of contributions to this debate could be multiplied. Suffice it to say
that the m ost recent aspect of the D utch concern with the subject has been tha t
perenn ial of imm igration deb ates, seen in Great Britain in the 1970s (e.g., L ayton-
Henry 1992: 156-59) and in France in the 1980s (Husbands 1991): illegal
imm igration. T here is something particularly unpleasant about this m atter in The
Netherlands, since it was arose out of reporting of the Bijlmermeer air disaster
on 4 October 1992, when an El Al cargo plane out of Schiphol Airport crashed
into a block of apartments in the Bijlmer area of Amsterdam. Original reports
about casualties, including the focus taken by the British media, had m ade mu ch
of the claim that their true number might never be known because of occupancy
of many of the destroyed homes by unregistered illegal immigrants. In order to
clarify the issue , an am nesty was offered to those surviving illegal imm igrants w ho
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198 Christopher Hu sband s
had been living in the apartment com plex. By mid-October about 300 had presented
themselves for legalisation of their status (NRC
Handelsblad^
19 October 1992:
3).
However, the issue of illegal immigration was amplified into a major policy
issue, despite more sober analyses of the minimal scale of any genuine problem
(e.g.,
NRC Handelsblad,
13 November 1992). Bolkestein, Brinkman and
representatives of the PvdA all jumped on to the illegal-immigration bandwagon
by demanding strong action, especially by th e municipalities, who are responsible
for the compilation of the country's population register.
8
Components and trajectories of the 'new moral panics'
It should be clear from these several examples that the subject of this analysis has
not usually been the concept of citizenship per se. As will be well-known, within
the past few years there has been an extensive discussion by sociologists and political
scientists of how different countries have come to define their own version of
nationality and national identity. There have been a number of interesting and
perceptive analyses of why the G ermans and th e Fre nch to take two well-known
con trasting examples — have historically defined nationality in different ways;
Fren ch nationality had been based predom inantly o n the
ius soli
princ iple, despite
suggestions from the mainstream right during the 1980s that this should be
mod ified; the se suggestions were rejected by th e Commission set u p by the Chirac
government in 1987 to hear evidence on the matter (Husbands 1991), although
the right-wing governm ent in power since M arch 1993 has now reintroduced some
departures from the ius soli principle. G erman nationality, on the other han d, was
always famously based upon
ius sanguinis,
formalised in the Wilhelmine
Reichs-
und Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz of June 1913 (Marshall 1992). As a leader in the
Süddeutsche
Zeitung
(4 Febru ary 1993 :4) pu t it: 'A Germ an is only so if descended
from Germans . . . Only in Germany, and nowhere else, did blood flow so strongly
into the la w ', a princip le in no way affected by the Aliens Law of 1991. Brubaker
(1992), for example, has analysed the historical bases for these very different
approaches. T hu s, debates about whether access to citizenship should b e eased,
such as the proposals in Germany in early 1993 by the SPD or by the Federal
Commissioner for Foreigners, Cornelia Schmalz-Jacobsen
(Süddeutsche Zeitung,
6/7 February 1993: 2) may be only m arginally the focus of our interest upo n crises
of national identity as moral panics, although the Frenc h example of the mid-1980s
shows that demands for access to be restricted or to be subject to some type of
'hu rd le' (e.g., a naturalisation process or even a loyalty oath) may be a consequence
of prior moral panics about national identity. Equally, long-running debates, as
in the Federal Repu blic and Fr an ce, about extending the franchise even if usually
only in local elections to non -citizens m eeting certain residence requ irements are
not directly a component of moral panics about national identity.
Moreover, we are not focusing upon crises of national identity of newly
emerg ent, or relatively newly emergent, nations that have been based up on some
form of assertive ethnic identity (such as the countries tha t won autonomy in E urope
after the First World War, like Poland or the former Czechoslovakia) nor upon
examples of contemporary regionally-based nationalism, such as the Flemings in
Flande rs or the B asques in Spain. Ou r examples have been taken from countries
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with national identities th at go bac k, theoretically at least, for well over a century
and in the case of the United Kingd om , France and T he N etherlands, num erous
centuries,
pace
the splitting-off of Belgium from T he N etherland s in 1830 and
Eugen W eber's demonstration of the limited national awareness among the F rench
peasantry in the nineteenth century (Weber 1976).
It is particularly ironic that, in those of these countries where there do exist
(according to some well-received interpretations) genuine doubts about aspects
of nationhood, it is not those factors that have engendered popu lar m oral panics
on the subject. Thus, whereas Nairn (1977: 126-215) and others have pointed
to the implications of Celtic nationalism for the viability of the United Kingdom,
neither Welsh nor Scottish nationalism nor such mini-regionalism as Cornish
nationalism nor the threat to British nationhood which it might be thought was
posed by over twenty years of separatist terrorism from the Provisional Irish
Republican A rmy feature in the contemporary British national identity crises that
are in common discourse and focused upon by elements of the mass media. F ranc e,
similarly, has subsumed Breton nationalism without undue trepidation but has
been consumed with anxieties about North African immigration (Husbands 1991).
Also,
despite belated official recognition that the unification of west and east
Germany has not been without p ain — indeed, th at it has produced major social
and economic dislocations the G erman state is still much more concerned about
asylum-seekers than in attem pting to avoid the development of a Mezzogiomo -typc
relationship between the old and new regions of the country.
Instead, although the precise content of each country's new moral panic is
distinc tive, the cases from the three countries examined in some detail in the earlier
part of this article show that they are marked by one or both of two particular
dominating themes; the first is simply numbers, to which symbolic connotations
become attached, partly for their own sake but also as political weapons used by
governm ents against oppositions and
vice
versa; th e second is cultural dilution or
thre at, which in mass-media discourse and public debate frequently comes to be
seen as a supposed consequence of the num bers issue. An impo rtant aspect of this
second theme is assimilability, especially at the moment of Muslim minorities in
west European countries, demonstrated (as we saw) by the British and Dutch
examples, although France could equally have been added.
Drowning by numbers
The social psychology of perception provides several insights into how nu m ber s,
apparently objective phenom ena, m ay assume a subjective reality. Actual num bers ,
even actual percentages, come to be interpreted differently in various national
contexts. Thus, the Federal Republic of Germany in, say, 1981 received 49,391
applications for political asylum w ithout m ajor reaction, more than the n um bers
(e.g ., 44,800 in 1991) that were cited by the British government in o rder to justify
its restrictions upon asylum entry in the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act
1993. Even trends over time assum e a different significance in different con texts.
Increases from a low num erical base are apparently far more strik ing, for sim ple
arithmetic reasons, than larger numerical increases from a larger initial base, or
they may be made to seem so by their treatment in the mass media.
Even tolerant individuals tend to have exaggerated perceptions of the nu m ber
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200 Christopher Hu sbands
or percentage of foreigners or imm igrants in their own population and the greater
the distortion in such pe rception, th e greater tends to be individual's subscription
to more overtly racist attitudes. Thus, perceptions of numbers of immigrants
allegedly in a coun try, because they are formed by a potent bu t a t times confusing
mix ture of locality observation, the mass-media reporting and treatm ent of 'e thnic '
issues (especially but not exclusively criminality), and on occasion even some
genuine know ledge, are connected with a num ber of aspects of moral panics about
national identity.
T he British case of the 1970s and the Frenc h example of the 1980s dem onstrate
how such perceptions can induce concern about the allegedly out-of-control
character of illegal immigration. The focus on this issue in The Netherlands in
the light of revelations from the Bijlmermeer disaster which were discussed and
also the increasing German nervousness about the supposed permeability of its
eastern border with Poland are dramatic aspects of contemporary moral panics.
Some mass-media coverage, in Germany and abroad , on patrolling of the G erman-
Polish border has been framed in the term s previously reserved for reporting on
the difficulties faced by the United States in policing its border with Mexico. A
controversial and highly criticised announcem ent by Rudolf Seiters, when he was
German Federal Minister of the Interior, that he intended to have the border
controlled by radar-based devices is an emotive reminder of how governm ents use
such issues for agenda-setting and policy profiling.
Powerful linguistic metaphors are derived from and support the 'numbers'
question.
9
Most contemporary European languages have come to describe
migration by ethnic m inority foreigners with graphic and potentially threatening
aquatic metapho rs. Perhaps this has subliminal implications, for it activates a deep-
seated human fear of death by drowning as a particularly unpleasant way to go.
10
Refugees do not come individually or in groups bu t in 'floods' and 'wa ves '. They
do not enter throug h airport or seaport passport controls bu t throug h 'floodgates'.
'Door closes on migrants: Clarke [former British Home Secretary] acts to stop
phoney refugees flooding into Britain' (Daily Mail, 23 October 1992: 25), is
particularly illustrative as a sub-editor's contribution to agenda-setting because
it also masks the concepts and p ractices of exclusion and expulsion behind another
metaphor, that of the closing door. In various languages such reports are easily
written in a manner that reinforces negative stereotypes about immigrants or
asylum-seekers, especially their supposed deviousness and association with crime
in the latter case bo th as perp etrators bu t also as 'victim beneficiaries'. 'Pho ney'
and 'bogus' have strong associations in English and references to 'immigration
rackets' connote illegal immigrants willing to pay substantially to be smuggled
into the country or to be allowed to work illegally. 'Slavemasters hunted after swoop
on migrant farm gangs', who 'are exploiting hundreds of immigrants by forcing
them to work in the fields for a pittance '
Daily
M ail, 19 May 1992: 11). Or: 'Gan gs'
immigrant scam: Homes and benefit swindle costs the taxpayer millions'
(Daily
Mail, 31 Decem ber 1992:13). Even victim-groups are not imm une from excoriation
in the light of occasional delinquencies by their peers: 'Bosnians on shoplifting
spree: two Bosnian refugees being supported by British taxpayers were caught
on a shoplifting sp ree'
(Da ily Ma il,
1 January 1993: 17). Alterna tive formulations
dramatise images of foreigners as viciously exploitative: 'Asylum-seekers plunder
Dre nte caravans', announced the D utch
De Telegraaf(4
Feb ruary 1992: 6) about
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a
group of Rum anians, on the day when the rest of the Du tch m edia were devoting
large am ounts of space to the fate of four Vietnam ese, formerly im migrant w orkers
in Czechoslovakia, who w ere being shunted as asylum-seekers between that country
and The Netherlands. This latter event received no coverage at all in that day's
issue of De
Telegraaf.
The significance of cultural dilution or threat
It is well-known and widely com mented upon th at sections of the political r igh t,
realising the crudity of straightforwardly rejectionist racial hostility, moved the
debate on race to the cultural level. As Barker (1981) for one has claimed, this
is the essential feature of 'the new racism ': whether it is M argaret Thatche r talking
of 'sw am ping ' (e.g., Layton-Hen ry 1992: 184 -85 ) or Jacques Chirac complaining
about 'odours' or, even more threateningly, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing emotively
talking of invasions (Husb ands 1992): 'the ir' cultures may be fine where they came
from, b ut we do not want them here The se, however, are particularly crude
examples of attempts to stimulate fears of cultural dilution, even if those who
uttered them should none the less be considered mainstream politicians. As the
cases discussed above reveal, a fear of Islam and of the unassimilability of M uslim
populations in west European countries has come to dominate m any contemporary
concerns about cultural dilution. In a sense this is unsurprising because the
confrontation of Christianity and Islam has long historical and geopolitical roots
and resonances, even if some scholars have recently attem pted to argue tha t Islam
does not pose a monolithic threa t (e .g., Esposito 1992). Th e final defeat of Tu rke y
in the First W orld W ar was once seen in the W est as a crucial event in establishing
Christian hegemony; even now, in a more overtly secular age, the attitude has
till recently prevailed that Islam had eventually been marginalised. However, events
of the last two or so decades have dispelled this certainty and raised some questions
about W estern hegemony that many find deeply disturbing . Most of the w orld's
recent trouble spots that have seriously threatened Western interests have been
a product of Islamic fundamentalism, usually in some part of the Middle East.
Th e rise of fundamentalism, with its far-reaching threats against W estern intere sts,
in countries such as Iran and Lebanon, and the role of a more prosaic Muslim
militance in the assertiveness of countries such as Libya, Iraq, Syria and even
Pakistan, have raised serious doubts about Western attitudes to Islam. Even
countries where the consequences of Islamic fundamentalism have so far been
restricted largely to the internal domestic terrain, such as Afghanistan, Algeria,
Tunisia and Egypt, raise a worrying spectre for many in the West that there will
be a 'contagion' among their own dom estic Muslim populations. Certainly, France
in its reaction to events in Algeria and Britain with its early ambivalence about
the Salman Rushd ie affair have shown the nervousness tha t can ensue from general
developments in the Islamic world.
This gives some added poignancy to the debates about whether or not a
country's foreign population can assimilate, despite the religious difference. In
the French case, 'optimists' have of course pointed to the historical experience
of the immigrant Belgians, Poles and Italians in the late-nineteenth century;
'pessimists', usually on the right, have argued that the Islam/Christianity difference
makes this a qualitatively distinct situation but the Muslim population cannot
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202 Christopher Hu sband s
assimilate a nd, as an ironic doub le-jeopardy, its very unassimilability is a threat
to indigenous French culture.
The pattern of the new moral pan ics
In fact, there are discernible tren ds in m any of these events, even if they are not
perhaps universal. Content analysis of such sources as newspapers would show
that there is a cyclicity in th e recurren ce of heightened sensitivities about national
identity in western Europ e. T he subject has never been truly 'se ttled ', since there
has always been a potential for some new aspect to emerge, often because of
exploitation for political purposes. E ach episode itself of such heightened sensitivity
follows a chronological pattern, with different political actors playing an almost
fully predictable set of roles. T hu s, th e extreme right is concerned on a perman ent
basis with the issue of national identity, although its continued simultaneous focus
on the alleged economic implications of the presen ce of imm igrants differentiates
it from the 'new racism ' forms of exclusionism of the mainstream right; the latter,
perh aps to seek a political advantage, moves to co-opt the issue when it becomes
opportune to do so, or vanguard sections of it do. Finally, perhaps after a long
and becoming show of reluctance and after some internal turmoil, the social-
dem ocratic left moves on to the sam e ideological terrain to p revent its right-wing
oppon ents from securing political advantage out of the issue. Th is chronology of
the spread of concern through most of the political spectrum from extreme right
to mainstream left is well dem onstrated by th e debate on immigration control into
the United Kingdom between 1959 and 1965 and in the Federal Republic by the
controversy about Article 16, Para. 2, of the Basic Law. In this second case, as
was seen, first the extreme right, then the CSU, then the CDU, and lastly (with
some diffidence and internal dispute) the
Freie
Demokratische
Partei
(FD P) and
SPD moved towards accepting a change in this article.
Conclusions
Thus, we are brought perhaps inevitably into the debate about the origins of
different types of nationalism and the 'wo rthiness ' of nationalisms and of nationalist
symbols. The issues are not clear-cut and it would be wrong to declare that
evaluative judgements on this subject should be made absolutely. For example,
Anthony Smith has in a number of his books (e.g., 1981; 1986; 1991) offered a
concept of nationalism, based up on subjectively defined notions of ethnicity, tha t
encompasses a sym pathetic , if sometimes critical, view of why soc ial collectivities
define themselves as a nation. W hat he calls
ethnies,
following the French-language
term , have a comm on m yth of descent, a 'sense of common im puted ancestry and
origins', which he makes clear may not be the same as actual descent. They also
have a shared history — 'historical comm unities built up on shared m em orie s',
with 'a sense of history uniting successive gen erations, each with its set of experi-
ences which are added to the common sto ck '. Subjectivity is crucial: 'what m atters
is not the au thenticity of the historical record, mu ch less any attempt at "objective"
methods of historicizing, but the poetic, didactic and integrative purposes which
tha t record is felt to disclose' (Sm ith 1986: 24—25). Alternatively, certain M arxist
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historians have been less willing to suspend critical judgement about the
subjectivities on which nationalism or national identity is based, although Smith
feels that it is missing the point to reject such m atters merely as self-justifications
and rationalisations. Hobsbaw m (1983), however, is mu ch m ore suspicious of the
essentiality of nation, arguing that many of the supposedly traditional symbols
of nation are actually inventions of the relatively recent past intended to
manufacture the concept of nation (e.g ., the pom p and circumstance surrounding
the British monarchy).
On the other hand, even those occupying something of a middle position
between these exemplars of the two divergent approaches recognise that 'na tion'
has a legitimate emotional reality. In his highly influential book, Benedict Anderson
distinguishes meaningfully between nationalism and racism.
The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies,
while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of
time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history.
He continues, perhaps more controversially:
The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than
in those of nation. . . . No surprise then that the putative sire of modern racism
should be, not some petty-bourgeois nationalist, but Joseph Arthur, Comte de
Gobineau.
(1983:
136)
The occurrence of moral panics about nationalism and national identity in even
those countries of western Europe where popular conceptions on these subjects
are supposedly most mature does none the less suggest that perhaps there is at
least a little merit in the views of more traditional Marxists that national identity
is not merely 'imagined' in Anderson's sense but, much more pejoratively,
'invented' in Hobsbawm's, invented perhaps for reasons related to ideological
contro l. If, after all, there is any trut h in the principal argum ent being proposed
by this article that moral panics about national identity in settled societies are
phenomena
sui generis,
it m ust be recognised th at, even in such societies, national
identity contains its insecurities. If the British can really lay claim to a national
heritage that may be traced back to Elizabeth I or before, why need they be worried
about the consequences of a few thousand asylum-seekers or the aspirations of
a small, recently arrived, M uslim com munity? If the Germ ans, albeit fully unified
only since the nineteenth centu ry, m ay none the less lay claim to their ethnie status
since before the Midd le Ages, why should they be so disturbed by the arrival of
non-Germans, even if their number is disproportionate in comparison with most
other European countries? The Dutch threw off the yoke of Spanish imperialism
in the early seventeenth century and revere their early 'nationalist' heroes such
as William the Silent; their country became a major m aritime pow er; they became
in the nineteenth century one of the foremost imperialist and mercantile-capitalist
nations of the world. If their national tradition is so rich and developed, why should
a small Muslim and imm igrant population seem such a threat to national dignity?
In choosing an emblematic figure to exemplify French national identity, one is
at a loss to know u pon w hich period one should con centrate: Charlem agne, Joan
of Arc, Louis XIV: wherever one wants to start, one necessarily asks questions
similar to those for the o ther countries — is Fre nch national identity so fragile that
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204 Christopher Hu sban ds
it can be eroded by the arrival of its ex-colonial subjects, or their descendants,
from north Africa?
Smith describes one of the causes of ethnic violence as:
a function of the uneven distribution of 'ethno-history'. There are considerable
differences in the nature, depth and richness of each community's historical
memories. Some communities claim a long, well-documented and powerfully
evocative ethno-history; others can fin d few records of communal exploits, and
of those most are recent. . . . In early modern Eastern Europe, for example, we
could have found distinctive
ethnies
such as.the Poles, Hungarians and Croats
in their historic states, boasting long and rich histories; submerged ethnic
communities like the Serbs, Rumanians and Bulgarians, . . . ; and ethnically mixed
areas and categories of Macedonians and Ruthenians.
(1991:
163)
Of course, moral panics about national identity m ay not am ount to ethnic violence
in th e sense of physical attack s, although racial attacks are one of the grass-roots
manifestations of such panics (Husbands 1993). None the less, if Sm ith's observa-
tions about this one cause of ethnic violence are valid and thus transferable to
understanding these 'new moral panics', it may well be that national identity in
even the mature and settled countries of western Europe is subject to more
uncertainty than has hitherto been considered. Many citizens of the United
Kingdom or even Th e N etherlands , despite their long-standing national traditions,
may suffer from a deep-seated psychic insecurity about the v iability of their notion
of nationhood. Perhaps Muslim groups in particular, asserting a tradition going
back centuries and whose apparent religious com mitm ent gives such an assertion
more validity than any about the long-term status of Christianity, seem to have
a 'richer' ethno-history and to pose a special psychic threat, despite the subordinate
status in colonial times of many of those concerned . T his insecurity is heightened
by the less secular character of immigrant Muslim communities compared with
indigenous Christian ones.
There is still one further question to address. The earlier descriptions of the
natu re of 'new moral pan ics' emphasised their cyclicity. There is plenty of evidence
that the strength of public and of élite concern varies there are noticeable surges
of interest and related psychic insecurity. Why do these surges occur when they
do? Media obsessions are relevant but reactive. Correlations with objective
circumstances in orde r to answer this question would clearly reveal some relation-
ship to macro-economic conditions, even if the relationship is fairly crude in a
temporal sense and a monocausal materialist approach is inadequate. Concerns
about foreigners increase during recessions, when there is reduced spiritual
. resilience and buoyancy and a corresponding tendency to resort to m aterially based
exclusionism, although it is still a further psychological step to m ove to the cultural
level, as the 'new moral pan ic' model dem ands. Resort to exaggerated nationalism
and fears about loss of national identity are instead the consequences of any general
crisis, which may not be merely economic. The mid-1970s moral panic about
national identity in Great Britain occurred in an economic recession but also in
the aftermath of the 1973—74 oil crisis, who raised geopolitical insecurities in
addition to economic difficulties on the individual level. It cannot be said that
the cu rrent Germ an concern abo ut asylum-seekers is particularly new , as we saw;
however, its emergence to the front of the political agenda has coincided with th e
country's worst-ever economic crisis, which has forced critical analyses of the
crippling costs of unification.
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T he prognosis from this current analysis is not a happy one on several levels.
The crises that have led to present conditions are unlikely to ameliorate in the
1990s; instead, with a more general moral vacuum about future world develop-
ments, there is every possibility of deterioration. The supposed eternal verities
of mature national identities may turn out to be more psychically fragile than
decades, perhaps centuries, of evolution would lead one to expect.
N o t e s
1 Th is article is a revision of a paper p resented to a conference on Ethnic ity, Nationalism
and Culture in Western Europe, which was held at the University of Amsterdam on
24-27 February 1993. The author is grateful in particular to Dr Meindert Fennema
for his comments on the earlier version.
2 A further form of hostility has arisen from anxiety about interference by foreigners
in a coun try 's interna l affairs, an often-seen reaction to the provisions of the M aastricht
Treaty.
3 Th e former are so-called ethnic Germ ans who moved into the Federal Rep ublic from
former Eastern Bloc countries, except from the Germ an Dem ocratic Republic (GD R).
The latter are those who moved from the GDR before German unification.
4 Until the early 1970s this term was exclusively an Americanism; it became used to
describe assaults and theft from the person com mitted on the street, w ith the implication
that blacks , especially black you ths, were the u sual perpetrators and wh ites, especially
old women, were the usual victims.
5 It would have been theoretically justifiable to give France equal treatm ent with the
three countries chosen and, indeed, frequent reference is made to the French case in
later discussions in the article. France is not discussed here with the status given to
the three other countries largely because the author has already written extensively
about several of the principal episodes that would necessarily be cited as illustrative
material (see Husbands 1991).
6 T he debate abou t public funding of Muslim schools in Great Britain is considered at
somewhat greater length in Husbands (1994).
7 In the light of the murderous attacks on Turk s in Germany, particularly at Mölln and
Solingen, there have been numerous calls, including ones from such luminaries as
President Richard von Weizsäcker, that Turks living in Germany should be allowed
dual citizenship. This would be a radical departure from the traditional principle of
Germ an citizenship law and has been greeted with special hostility and reserve by the
CD U and CSU ; however, it would be difficult to claim th at such calls had materially
contributed to the moral panic in Germany on national identity.
8 Reacting to fears about num bers , Th e Ne therlands also introduced a more restrictive
policy on political asylum in S eptem ber 1993, although it is scarcely alone among west
European countries (even excluding the Federal R epublic and the United Kingdom)
in having done, or proposed doing, this within the past year.
9 Th e num bers issue is embodied in several so-called urban my th s, whose subtext is
often clearly racist e.g., that '60 per cent of Birmingham is coloured' or that 'there
are more Patels than Smiths in London'.
10 Th e drowning image is certainly encountered in anti-foreigner m aterial, particularly
that from the extreme righ t, although o ther symbols also occur (e.g., c ontamination,
desecration, disease, and so on). Classical psychoanalytic tex ts have rathe r little to say
on the fear of death by drowning. Jung (1961: 221) does discuss a case in which a
child comments on the unpleasantness of death by drowning, but this is perversely
reinterpreted as a pregnancy fantasy in terms of its analogy to amniotic fluid in the
womb.
On the other ha nd , drowning is the second-favourite method of suicide (after taking
drugs);
perhaps the drown ing image is instead to b e interpreted as a semiotic way of
appealing to the death instinct.
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