‘To fight yesterday’s forgetting, is to fight racism today’: Holocaust and colonial memory cultures in British and French

anti-racism, c. 1980-2001.

Patrick James Soulsby

23440066

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Edge Hill University for the award of Doctor of Philosophy.

Spring 2020

Word Count: 79,894

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Contents

Abstract 3

Acronyms 4

Note on Translation5

Introduction6

Chapter One:

‘L’histoire prend son temps.’: Anti-racist Holocaust memory in Britain and France, c. 1980-1989 32

Chapter Two:

Anti-racist (post)colonial memories in Britain and France, c. 1980-199160

Chapter Three:

‘Anti-racist nonsense’?; Anti-racism and its Detractors, c.1982-199082

Chapter Four:

The Turn to Europe: Anti-racism between Memory and History104

Chapter Five:

Overlapping memory cultures and the ‘twin evils of racism and fascism’, c. 1992-2001 129

Conclusion153

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Acknowledgments 159

Bibliography 161

Abstract

This thesis explores British and French anti-racist memory culture from 1980 to 2001. Specifically, it explores the complex development, articulation and tentative intersections between Holocaust and colonial memory. Taking a largely textual approach through anti-racist print media, it makes the case that anti-racists on both sides of the Channel possessed profoundly historicist approaches to their contemporary activism against racism and wielded the memory of past instances of racism as a challenge to received national narratives of the past. The differing national experiences of the Holocaust, the Second World War, the Vichy regime as well as the shared experience of colonialism contributed to the formation of highly supple memory cultures. While there was not always consensus over the prioritisation or interpretation of certain memories – indeed, in some cases, anti-racists were bitterly divided over competing memories – there was nevertheless a shared belief in the value of the past in teaching and warning the present of the consequences of racism. Compared to Holocaust memory, anti-racist colonial memory was highly fragmented over the case of the 1980s, with the legacy of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) largely serving as the nodal point around which colonial memory revolved in France. In the British case, colonial memory was more fragmented still, though by the 1990s it underwent some tentative negotiation. While primarily national in scope throughout the 1980s, anti-racists on both sides of the Channel underwent a ‘European turn’ in the early 1990s which had profound implications for the development of their complex memory cultures. History and memory served a pedagogical and didactic function in which the racism of the present could be interpreted and challenged through reference to the past.

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Key Words: Anti-racism, memory, Holocaust, European colonialism, historical memory.

Acronyms

AFA Anti-Fascist Action

ANL Anti-Nazi League

ARA Anti-Racist Alliance

CAFE Campaign against Fascism in Europe

CARF Campaign against Racism and Fascism

CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain

CRIF Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France

LICA Ligue internationale contre l’antisémitisme

LICRA Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme

MRAP Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples

PCF Parti communiste français

PS Parti socialiste

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SWP Socialist Workers Party

Note on Translations

All translations are my own and responsibility for any errors is mine alone.

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INTRODUCTION

In the spring of 2019, the latest edition of the longstanding anti-racist and anti-fascist magazine, Searchlight, appeared. Founded in 1975 in response to the growing electoral challenge of the National Front, the magazine was intended to cast a light on the clandestine activities of the far-right and report on racism in Britain. Its contemporary incarnation carried a front page headline announcing the centenary of the birth of fascism and, inside, contained a translated letter from an Italian anti-fascist to the country’s president, Sergio Mattarella, making the case for a formal apology by the Italian state to mark the ‘anniversary of Mussolini’s rise’.1 The issue also contained articles on the

1 Alfio Bernabei, ‘100 years since the birth of fascism’, Searchlight (Spring, 2019), pp. 24-25.

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relationship between the far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (more commonly known by his pseudonym, Tommy Robinson) and the media, the state of the international alt-right as well as informative reports on the far-right in Greece and Hungary.2 This was a slick magazine which emphasised its veteran anti-fascist credentials – its subtitle read ‘Fighting Fascism since 1975’ – and was truly international in scope. Readers are well-informed by contributions from activists, academics and experts on racism and fascism past and present. In the editorial, Gerry Gable - who together with the late Maurice Ludmer had co-founded Searchlight – commented rather self-deprecatingly that ‘[r]eaders of Searchlight must be sick and tired of me warning over the past three years that we are seeing a rise of fascism and national socialism, accompanied by racial and religious hatred’.3 While the political and cultural landscape of the past three years have indeed been marked by the rapid mainstreaming and normalisation of the radical right and a rise in racism – explained by a bewildering variety of reasons ranging from a popular backlash against the economic, social and demographic transformations wrought by globalisation, the anger of the ‘somewheres’ or ‘left-behinds’ against ‘anywheres’ to the angry cacophonies of social media echo chambers4 – Searchlight magazine had been issuing dire warnings of the rise of racism and fascism for nearly fifty years.

Memory played a crucial role in these warnings. Implicitly and explicitly, the memory cultures of historical instances of racist thinking and racist violence was integral to anti-racist thought and practice. Unlike anti-fascism, anti-racism cannot be understood as a purely ‘reactive phenomenon’: its activism was not solely determined by the demands and concerns of the present-moment.5 Searchlight and other anti-racist movements, their associated publications, and research networks drew from a deep well of historical consciousness. As the general secretary of one of the most well-known French anti-racist movements, the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples (MRAP),

2 Tash Shifrin, ‘Tommy Robinson vs. the media’, pp. 12-15; Sally Shaw, ‘All change on the alt-right’, pp. 16-18; Martin Smith, ‘Hungary for change’, pp. 20-21; and, Maria Spiliotopoulou, ‘Standing in solidarity against Golden Dawn’, Searchlight (Spring, 2019), pp. 26-28. 3 Gerry Gable, ‘A grim centenary as fascism grows again’, Searchlight (Spring, 2019), p. 5. 4 See Paul Stocker, English Uprising: Brexit and the mainstreaming of the far-right (London, 2017); David A. Neiwert, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (London, 2018); Jan Werner-Müller, What is Populism? (Philadelphia, 2016); David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (London, 2017).5 Nigel Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 189.

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Mouloud Aounit wrote in 1996, marking the thirty-fifth anniversary of the massacre of peaceful Algerian demonstrators in the heart of Paris on 17 October 1961, ‘combattre l’oubli d’hier, c’est combattre le racisme d’aujourd’hui’.6 One of the foundational pillars upon which British and French anti-racism rested was the memory of historical racism, from European colonialism to the Holocaust.

This thesis examines the role of Holocaust and colonial memory in British and French anti-racist activism between 1980 and 2001. It argues that memory was a crucial conduit through which activists and organisations articulated their diverse visions of anti-racism. It explores why, at certain moments, such memories informed the contemporary struggle against racism and the rise of the far-right. In many cases, from the rue Copernic bombing in Paris in October 1980 or l’affaire Carpentras in May 1990, instances of racist violence and desecration were triggers for the resurfacing and re-articulation of memory.7 Furthermore, this thesis makes the case that while anti-racist actors were sometimes at the margins of political and civic discourse, expressions of anti-racist memory cultures were powerful rhetorical devices through which to challenge state-approved national narratives of the past in which the legacies of racism and antisemitism were either, in the case of empire, legitimised or, in the cases of the Holocaust and colonial atrocity, repressed or ignored.

One of the fundamental challenges in writing a thesis about the role of memory in European anti-racist activism is that it can appear, at first glance, as little more than an exercise in stating the obvious. Memory was indeed an integral component of the anti-racist struggle. The long and heavy shadows of the Holocaust and the atrocities which punctuated the narratives of British and French colonial experience were inescapable. The closing decades of the twentieth century were crucial in the development of these memories at a national and European level. The 1980s and 1990s saw an increasing engagement with the historical realities of the Holocaust and, to a lesser extent, Europe’s colonial legacies. Defined as these historical events and processes were by racism, how could anti-racists operate without invoking such historical points of reference? In a post-Holocaust and increasingly post-colonial Europe, the racism of the past hung over the present. The meanings and historical

6 ‘To fight yesterday’s forgetting, is to fight racism today.’: Mouloud Aounit, ’17 octobre 1961’, Le Monde (17 October 1996).7 See Joan B. Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (Stanford, 2004).

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resonance behind anti-racist and anti-fascist phrases such as ‘Never Again!’ or ‘plus jamais ça!’ were self-evident. With such knowledge of what racism could lead to, anti-racists were beholden to the past in their resistance to racism in the present. However, it is important to emphasise that anti-racist memory cultures and their understandings of the past were extremely heterogeneous. While the memory cultures of organisations such as the Ligue internationale contre l’antisémitisme et le racisme (LICRA) revolved around the twisted legacies of interwar antisemitism, Vichy and the Holocaust, others, such as the MRAP (which, like the LICRA was originally founded as a result of the experience of interwar and war-time antisemitism) turned their focus in the post-war period towards the colonial and post-colonial racism faced by Algerians and North Africans in France.

The respective national historical, political and social contexts are crucial to understanding the development and character of anti-racist movements in Britain and France.8 If this context was important to the thought and practice of diverse anti-racist actors, it also matters for any understanding of anti-racist memory cultures. In taking a transnational approach to cross-Channel anti-racism, this thesis will demonstrate how respective national histories inevitably informed the content and articulation of memory. To explore anti-racist memory cultures is to acquire a deeper understanding of how anti-racists saw themselves in relation to the past, present and future. Here was a cause upon which the heavy weight of history – especially that of modern Europe and its global colonial encounters – rested. By invoking memory, anti-racists challenged the received national narratives of the past reminding the societies in which they lived of the historical injustices and atrocities that many would rather forget. Anti-racist memory thus served as a rebuke, a challenge and powerful rejection of the conventional understandings of the past.

Perhaps it is the obviousness of the importance of history to anti-racism which has meant that there has been as of yet no full-length study into the subject. However most scholars of anti-racism have, like Catherine Lloyd, acknowledged the centrality of the past to late twentieth-century anti-racism.9 Alana Lentin has also acknowledged the importance of history to the anti-racist struggle, characterising anti-racism as, in part, an exercise in critiquing the narratives of ‘modern nation-state histories’ which are as defined by

8 Cathie Lloyd, ‘L’action anti-raciste en France et en Grande-Bretagne’, in Andrea Rea, Immigration et Racisme en Europe (Brussels, 1998), p. 89.9 Catherine Lloyd, Discourses of Anti-Racism in France, (Aldershot, 1998), p. 59.

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‘colonialism, fascism, Nazism and the suppression of immigrants’ rights as they are…universal suffrage, the defence of human rights and the suppression of totalitarianism’.10 In a similar vein, Alastair Bonnett has argued that history was ‘constantly deployed by anti-racists’ and that narratives of the past played a crucial role for anti-racists ‘as a site of legitimation and by providing examples of what racism is and where it leads’.11 While such examples make clear that history was, indeed, integral to anti-racist understandings of contemporary racism as well as to anti-racist understandings of their own tradition of protest, a deeper exploration of the uneven and complex terrain of anti-racist memory cultures is necessary. It is notable that much of the existing academic literature on anti-racism has largely been produced by sociologists and cultural theorists. The invaluable research of scholars such as Paul Gilroy, Alana Lentin, Étienne Balibar, Floya Anthias and Catherine Lloyd has contributed to contemporary understandings of the complex dynamics at work within anti-racism.12 They also provide a crucial intellectual foundation for historians of twentieth-century anti-racism. By building on this existing research, this thesis offers a modest contribution to what is hoped will become a growing historical literature on anti-racism.

There are a number of reasons for selecting Britain and France as the geographical points of focus in this study. Their shared histories as imperial powers (and competitors) with significant global reach spanning several centuries is a principal factor.13 Furthermore, their respective approaches to maintaining and governing their colonial properties significantly influenced the later development of their responses to the post-colonial ‘ethnic dilemmas’ of integrating newcomers into the national fold.14 This turn from the colonial to the post-colonial has meant that, in France, the weight of the republican conception of citizenship in which the state views the citizen as an individual shorn of all

10 Alana Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe (London, 2000), p. 3. 11 Alastair Bonnet, Anti-Racism (London, 2000), p. 9. 12 See Paul Gilroy, ‘There ain’t no black in the Union Jack’: The cultural politics of race and nation (London, 1987); Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe (London, 2000); Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, nation, classe: Les identités ambiguës (Paris, 1998); Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, Racialized Boundaries: race, nation, gender, colour and class and the anti-racist struggle (London, 1993); Lloyd, Discourses of Anti-racism in France (Aldershot, 1998). 13 See Robert Tombs and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (London, 2006); see also Maurice Vaisse and Robert Tombs (eds.), L’histoire colonial en débat en France et en Grande-Bretagne (Paris, 2010). 14 Adrian Favell, Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 2.

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other markers of identity (such as gender, ethnicity, culture or religion) has determined the country’s approach to immigration and the accommodation of post-colonial (and other) minorities inside the Hexagon.15 The ideal of intégration – a word burdened by myriad interpretations – was in some ways strengthened by the fear of désintégration, the fracture sociale and the ostensible dangers of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ communautarisme. The latter, in which society is divided along ethnic, religious, cultural or gendered lines, has long haunted the would-be guardians of a ‘one and indivisible’ republic.16 For post-colonial communities living in France, the theoretical liberties and equalities to be enjoyed by citizenship have jarred with the reality of socio-economic inequalities, injustices and lived experiences of racism. Britain’s early adoption of the language of ‘race relations’ and the creation of legislation outlawing racial discrimination in public spaces in 1965 and 1968 contrasted sharply with the French approach. While the French state did not recognise ‘difference’ in racial or ethnic terms, the development in Britain of a multicultural model society in which cultural and ethnic differences were both recognised and protected were interpreted as extensions on British liberal traditions of tolerance and fairness.17 So went the theory. In practice racial discrimination by the state and in the streets actively contributed to the perpetuation of serious inequalities. In France, republicanism, intégration and citoyenneté constituted the ‘dominant policy framework’ through which the post-colonial dilemma was addressed while the British approach revolved around legislative conceptions of ‘race relations’ and multiculturalism.18 Britain’s - at times, ambivalent - embrace of a multicultural model has contrasted sharply with multiculturalism’s ‘taboo’ status in a French political culture anxious to safeguard the republican myth of French nationhood.19

The respective histories of British and French colonialism spanned several centuries, from their beginnings in the sixteenth- and seventeenth- centuries – the age of ‘discovery’ – to their truly global statuses in the late nineteenth-century and, finally, to the twisted paths of decolonisation in the 15 David Blatt, ‘Immigrant Politics in a Republican Nation’, in Alec Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (eds.), Post-colonial Cultures in France (London, 1997), pp. 48-49.16 Emile Chabal, A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 80-81. 17 However, this also went hand-in-hand with a racialisation of immigration from the 1950s onwards. For more, see John Solomos, Race and Racism in Britain (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 56. 18 Favell, Philosophies of Integration, p. 2.19 Alec Hargreaves, ‘Multiculturalism’, in Christopher Flood and Laurence Bell (eds.), Political Ideologies in Contemporary France (London, 1997), p. 180.

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1950s and 1960s.20 The acceleration of imperial expansion and colonial acquisition in the latter half of the nineteenth century coincided with and was propelled by the development of ‘race-thinking’ and biological racism.21 Between the height of imperial expansion in the interwar period and decolonization after 1945 there was a remarkable degree of continuity between racism of a colonial nature and antisemitism.22 France and Britain both experienced significant time lags between the formal ends of their respective empires. These were followed by divergent and complex national ‘process[es] of reckoning’ with the ‘implications and legacies’ of imperial and colonial histories.23

In different ways, the closing decades of the twentieth century were very important in the development of the processes of reckoning, not just of the colonial past but of the history of the Holocaust. This thesis examines the period between 1980 and 2001 for a number of reasons. In the first place, the early 1980s saw anti-racism in Britain and France in differing states of health. Following the mass mobilisations of the late 1970s – from the establishment of Rock against Racism (RAR) in 1976 to the founding of the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) the following year – the energy, momentum and numbers of British anti-racism went into sharp decline. The ANL’s show of force and resistance against the National Front and its success in convincing broad swathes of the electorate that the leadership and membership of the organisation were deeply motivated by fascism and, specifically, Nazism, was highly effective. At the same time, Margaret Thatcher’s infamous comments during a television interview in 1978 during which she expressed sympathy with Britons ‘afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’ were also seen to have diverted votes away from the National Front.24 Following the electoral

20 See Alice L. Conklin, Sarah Fishman and Robert Zaretsky, France and its Empire since 1870 (Oxford, 2015); John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970 (Cambridge, 2009); Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France and their Roads from Empire (Oxford, 2014); for an exploration of the two imperial powers’ shared yet differing experiences of decolonisation see Andrew W. M. Smith and Chris Jeppesen (eds.), Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect? (London, 2017). 21 Hannah Arendt, ‘Race-Thinking before Racism’, in The Review of Politics, 6:1 (January 1944), pp. 36-73.22 Neil MacMaster, Racism in Europe, 1870-2000 (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 168.23 Elizabeth Buettner, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society and Culture (Cambridge, 2016), p. 5.24 Margaret Thatcher, ‘TV Interview for Granada World in Action’ in Margaret Thatcher Foundation (27 January 1978): http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103485 [Last accessed: 03/12/2019].

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collapse of the National Front and the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister on 4 May 1979, it was not long before Britain’s anti-racist movement began to fragment. Broader pessimism about the state of anti-racism in Britain was expressed by Searchlight in October 1981 when it lamented that there was no longer an ‘anti-racist, anti-fascist movement to speak of’.25 By contrast, anti-racism in France appeared in the early 1980s to be in rude good health. The triumph of François Mitterrand in the presidential elections of May 1981, bolstered by the success of the Parti Socialiste (PS) in the elections to the Assemblée Nationale, was greeted with cautious optimism by anti-racists. Jean Pierre-Bloch dared to hope that Mitterrand would demonstrate his commitment to the anti-racist cause and to ‘une politique antiraciste efficace et humaine’.26 The general secretary of the MRAP, Albert Lévy, wrote on the organisation’s behalf to congratulate Mitterrand on his election and to express its hopes that he would implement ‘positive measures’ for a politics of anti-racism and an overhaul of immigration laws.27 However, this honeymoon period of optimism soon gave way to disappointment when the government reversed some of the sweeping reforms initially introduced as a result of poor economic performance. The mass mobilisations of the Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme of 1983 (which saw prominent activists invited to meet with Mitterrand at the Élysée Palace) and the formation of SOS Racisme the following year can be viewed as an attempt to revive optimism over the state of French political society by mobilising young people of North African descent to demand equality and recognition.28

Such a sharp contrast makes for a fascinating study of the divergence in anti-racist fortunes on both sides of the Channel, as does the uneven development and articulation of Holocaust and colonial memory cultures in British and French anti-racist circles over the course of the late 1980s and 1990s. As chapter four will explore, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw a significant reorientation in anti-racist thought and practice. British and French anti-racists began to situate themselves and their struggles within a broader

25 ‘Editorial’, Searchlight (October 1981), p. 2. 26 Jean Pierre-Bloch, ‘Un président pour les antiracistes?’, Le Droit de Vivre (June 1981), p. 3. 27 Albert Lévy, ‘Pour une France sans racisme: l’Espoir’, Droit et Liberté (July-August 1981), p. 1. 28 See Saïd Bouamama, Dix ans de marche des Beurs: Chronique d’un mouvement avorté (Paris, 1994). See also, Richard L. Derderian, North Africans in Contemporary France: Becoming Visible (Basingstoke, 2004).

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European context. The 1990s, beginning with a string of anniversaries marking half a century since the Second World War and the Holocaust, proved to be a critical period for the ascent of Holocaust memory as the historical and moral point of reference for Western Europe. However, it was also during the 1990s that colonial memory cultures began to emerge on a more prominent basis, prised open by and interacting with Holocaust memory. The phrase le devoir de mémoire which, up until that point had been used with almost exclusive reference to the memory of the Holocaust, was beginning to be applied by anti-racists to France’s colonial legacy at the dawn of the new millennium. While 2005 would see colonial memory take a more central place within French political culture, the legacies of the British Empire and colonialism would continue to be a contested and neglected subject in political and public life until fierce debate was prised open on national history and legacies during and after Britain’s referendum on membership of the European Union in June 2016. The 1980s and 1990s, therefore, provide something of a pre-history of such debates which situating them within the context of anti-racism. To a significant extent, one of the questions guiding this thesis is not so much what the contemporary history of the 1980s and 1990s can tell us about the development of British and French anti-racist memory cultures but, rather, what the development of these anti-racist memory cultures can reveal to us about the closing decades of the twentieth century.

Examining Holocaust and colonial memories in anti-racist activism is by no means to suggest an equivalence between the two historical phenomena. The two spheres of memory enfolded themselves into anti-racist logic and, as historical events and processes, they should be understood, as Dan Stone has argued, as ‘part of a continuum of practices of racist-driven territorial expansion that have characterized the ‘rise’ of the modern West’.29 The experience of global imperial expansion and colonial acquisition was central to the development of the Western world. However, European colonialism and the Holocaust differed significantly in terms of their geography, timeline and memory. In terms of geography, the Holocaust was an event that was and is increasingly understood as European and transnational whereas the history of colonialism was a truly global phenomenon. The Holocaust began, in earnest, in 1940 - though this was preceded by the passing of antisemitic legislation such

29 Dan Stone, ‘Britannia Waives the Rules: British Imperialism and Holocaust Memory’, in Dan Stone (ed.), History, Memory and Mass Atrocity (London, 2006), p. 190.

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as the Nuremburg Laws of 1935 in Nazi Germany and widespread antisemitism across Europe during the interwar period - and came to an end with the liberation of the extermination and labour camps during the winter and spring of 1945.30 The virulent antisemitism underpinning the murder of six million European Jews possessed roots going as far back as the early medieval period. The Holocaust, widely viewed as the culmination or, rather, the nadir of centuries of religious, cultural, social and economic anti-Jewish persecution in Europe, became the nodal point around which Jewish, European and anti-racist memory revolved.

Finally, there has been no shortage of writing on the contentious topic of race, its conceptual problematisation and the challenges faced by those inside and outside the academy in addressing the contemporary endurance of racism.31 As has been well-established, race is – like gender – a social construct.32 Since the focus of this thesis is on anti-racist movements, there will be little reference to the concept of race. However, it should be clarified here that race is understood as neither a valid nor useful concept for the categorisation of different groups of people. However, while race does not exist in scientific or biological terms, it is nevertheless something that is both socially and ideologically real.33 To refer to race or races is to imply and impose on human groups a homogeneity which does not exist. Rather than race, it is racialisation, a phenomenon borne out of the modern European imperial experience, which artificially imposes or ‘sees’ certain characteristics as intrinsic to certain human groups and contributes to the endurance of racism in contemporary society. It also perpetuates old and discredited notions of racial difference in biological and hierarchical terms.

30 For a highly detailed overview of the historical development of the Final Solution which goes beyond the conventional chronological book-ends of 1940 to 1945 see, for example, David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews, 1933-1949 (London, 2016). 31 See, for example, Alana Lentin, ‘’Race’, Racism and Anti-racism: Challenging Contemporary Classifications’, in Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 6:1 (2000): Paul Gilroy, Between camps: nations, cultures and the allure of race (New York, 2004). See also Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race (London, 2017).32 Robin Diangelo, White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism (London, 2019), p. 15.33 Geoff Eley, ‘The Trouble with ‘Race’: Migrancy, Cultural Difference and the Remaking of Europe’, in Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley and Atina Grossmann (eds.), After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (Michigan, 2009), p. 161.

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Towards a definition of anti-racist memories and memory cultures Defining memory is a notoriously challenging task for the historian. The fluidity of the term does not lend itself easily to discernible conceptual definition. No sooner than one identifies the essential meaning of memory (that which is remembered), questions about its conceptual essence (whose memory? which memories?) arise. Furthermore, memory is unreliable. As in our personal lives, so too in History. For historians, memory has become – for good and for ill - a fixed and visible feature of the discipline’s landscape since the ‘memory turn’ of the 1970s and 1980s. In 2016 the French historian Henry Rousso, who played a key role in sparking the ‘memory boom’ with Le Syndrome de Vichy (1987) commented on the emergence over the past thirty years of memory as a ‘major political and moral value’ in which the act of remembrance and commemoration, both at the level of the state and within civil society, has become a cornerstone in contemporary understandings of ourselves.34 The development of public consciousness of the Holocaust, for instance, and the nationalisation and universalisation (as contested as the latter may be) of its memory and legacy is the example of this process in the late twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first. While conceding that the embrace of memory as a category of historical analysis has resulted in profoundly nuanced and original contributions to our understandings of the past, Rousso nevertheless expressed concern over the limits of memory and memorialisation in an age that increasingly recognises the ‘diversification of historical experiences’.35 Confronting the sheer multiplicity of historical experiences and their memories should alert the contemporary historian to the stark challenges to be encountered when researching, thinking and writing about historical memory.

Understanding historical memory or how historical actors remember past events offers valuable insights into the influence that the past can have in shaping identity, constructing alternative narratives of the past and seeking historical, moral or legal justice.36 The use of history and memory as a means of securing justice in the present was and remains a crucial feature of anti-racist

34 Henry Rousso, ‘Time, Memory and History. At the Crossroads of European Memory’, Observing Memories (2016): http://europeanmemories.net/magazine/time-memory-and-history-at-the-crossroads-of-european-memory/ [Last accessed: 30/01/2019].35 See Henry Rousso, Face au passé: Essais sur la mémoire contemporaine (Paris, 2016).36 In the case of the latter see Richard Golsan, Memory, the Holocaust and French Justice: The Bousquet and Touvier Affairs (London, 1996). See also Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven, 2001).

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activism.37 The role of history and memory within anti-racist activism has yet to be explored in significant detail. This thesis, by focusing on the contours and internal dynamics of anti-racist memory cultures on both sides of the Channel offers an original contribution to understandings of anti-racism as a profoundly historically-conscious movement. Challenging the racism of the present with reference to the racist past was a complex though powerful approach of anti-racist activity in the 1980s and 1990s. Memory, rather than existing in isolation from the political and cultural context of the present, could be a forceful vehicle for effecting change in contemporary social realities. As Claire Eldridge has noted in her study of the development of pied-noir and harki memory from the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 1962 to 2012, ‘[r]ather than an abstract entity floating somewhere in the cultural atmosphere, memory takes shape within the societies it concerns’.38 Memory can cast deep roots in a particular place or social group. It can profoundly influence the way in which individuals, groups – identified by religious-affiliation, ethnicity, shared historical experience and other cultural markers – and societies view themselves.39 This echoes Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka’s assessment that individuals, in belonging to a group however defined, possess ‘numerous self-images and memories’ by which they identify themselves.40 Memory, in the context of historical thinking, is not therefore an ethereal or woolly abstraction but a reality grounded in the human experience. And to be grounded in the human experience is to be grounded in History.

Some historians such as Pierre Nora have argued that history and memory are fundamentally opposed to each other.41 If memory is about the

37 One of the most recent and high-profile examples of this is the Rhodes Must Fall movement which began with protests against the University of Cape Town’s statue of Cecil Rhodes in 2015. This campaign soon spread making its presence known at Oriel College at the University of Oxford which also boasts a statue of Rhodes. As an anti-racist and anticolonial movement it was and continues to be a fascinating example of the publicisation of Britain’s colonial history and legacy, opening up broader public debate in the process. See Brian Kwoba, Roseanne Chantiluke and Athinangamso Nkopo (eds.), Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire (London, 2018). For further scholarship see Dalia Gebrial, ‘Rhodes Must Fall: Oxford and Movements for Change’, in Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancioğlu (eds.), Decolonising the University (London, 2018).38 Claire Eldridge, From empire to exile: History and memory within the pied-noir and harki communities, 1962-2012 (Manchester, 2016), p. 11. 39 Katherin Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (eds.), Contested Pasts; The Politics of Memory (London, 2003), p. 8.40 Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, in New German Critique, 65 (1995), p. 127. 41 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, No. 26 (Spring 1989), p. 8.

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sacralisation of the past through ritual commemoration rooted in space, place, object or building, then history is about the past’s secularisation, stripped of its myths and legends. But this is a far too sharply drawn distinction between history and memory. Memory as an analytical concept necessarily possesses a mutable, multi-layered and interdisciplinary nature.42 Memory is always liable to change and contestation. Anti-racist memory cultures can, to a significant extent, be characterised as ‘multidirectional’ and the intersections that developed in the 1990s between Holocaust and colonial memories reflected that they are ‘‘subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing’.43 This thesis will, at various points, apply Michael Rothberg’s concept of ‘multidirectional memory’ to the history of British and French anti-racism in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, the role of Holocaust memory in contributing to ‘the articulation of other memories’, such as the memory of colonialism, was crucial

in the context of late twentieth-century anti-racist activism.44 There is an unease in the relationship between history and memory and it

is striking that it has at times been compared to awkward familial relations or even in romantic terms. The historian Tony Judt likened history and memory to step-siblings who ‘hate one another while sharing just enough in common to be inseparable’. Memory is ‘younger and more attractive’ while History is the ‘older sibling…plain and serious’ from whom people shy away.45 Judt was concerned by what he saw as the blurring of boundaries between history and memory. As far as understandings of the past go, history took priority: ‘Without history, memory is open to abuse. But if history comes first, then memory has a template and guide against which it can work and be assessed’.46 For late twentieth-century British and French anti-racists, history served as a rebuke of both forgetting and national memories which offered a comforting and self-congratulatory view of the past. Yet, anti-racists were also prone to the siren song of memory over history, a prime example being Searchlight magazine’s occasional tendency towards the triumphalist memory culture of Britain’s ‘anti-fascist’ struggle during the Second World War(see Chapter 1).47 Geoffrey Cubitt

42 See Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester, 2007).43 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memories: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, 2009), p. 3. 44 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, p. 3. 45 Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (London, 2012), pp. 276-277.46 Ibid., p. 278.47 This is an example of what Konrad Jarausch has identified as the Western regime of postwar memory which was triumphalist in character, based on memories of a ‘good

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has characterised the relationship between history and memory as one in which both can be found at different times

interacting with each other, moving in and out of each other, circling each other warily or amorously, sometimes embracing, sometimes separating, sometimes jostling for position or the discursive terrain that is their common habitat’.48

Both characterisations of memory and history demonstrate the complex symbiotic relationship that exists between them while self-consciously trying to move away from the tendency to think about them in purely abstract terms by giving them a more human face.

This thesis is not so much interested in anti-racist memory as it is in anti-racist memory cultures. Memory cultures are pools of memory into which diverse personal, social and institutional memories pour and intermix with existing traces of historical memory. The concept of anti-racist memory cultures is helpful in that it can incorporate a variety of personal and institutional memories. While the lived experiences and personal memories of individuals like Maurice Ludmer and Jean Pierre-Bloch should not be seen as representative of all aspects of anti-racist memory culture (for example, Pierre-Bloch did not have much to say about France’s colonial legacies) their experiential memories of the Holocaust and its legacies nevertheless contributed in important ways to the development of the anti-racist memory cultures of their respective institutions and publications. These tributaries of personal memory made their way into the much larger lake of anti-racist memory culture. As Maurice Halbwachs asserted, ‘individual memory is…a part or an aspect of group memory’.49 Indeed, this conceptualisation of historical memory cultures draws from the ideas of Halbwachs, who famously stressed that collective historical memory is, above all, socially constructed, emphasising the fundamentally ‘social’ character of collective memory and its dependence on social groups (in all their diversity) for its sustenance and commemoration.50

war’. See Konrad H Jarausch. ‘Nightmares or Daydreams? A Postscript on the Europeanisation of Memories’ in Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth (eds.), A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (London, 2010), pp. 310-311. 48 Cubitt, History and Memory, p. 5.49 Lewis A. Coser (ed.), Maurice Halbwachs: On Collective Memory (London, 1992), p. 53. 50 Ibid., p. 22.

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This is of direct relevance in relation to the groups to be examined in this thesis, most notably individual anti-racist organisations and publications. Halbwachs’ sentiments were later echoed by Paul Ricoeur’s assertion that memory cannot just be a solitary exercise; ‘one does not remember alone’.51 Thus while the personal memories of Pierre-Bloch or Ludmer contributed to the particular memory cultures of their respective anti-racist organisations and publications, they are not entirely representative of those memory cultures. The term ‘memory cultures’ allows for a greater diversity of related memories to be accommodated. There was no such thing as a homogenous memory culture shared by all anti-racists in Britain and France. As will be seen over the course of this thesis, the myriad contributions of anti-racist writers, activists and contributors to different publications reflected the remarkably diverse articulations of a shared memory culture. The concept of anti-racist memory cultures is helpful in that it can incorporate a variety of personal and institutional memories. For the sake of clarity, this thesis will, therefore, employ the term ‘historical memory’ when referring to personal or individual memories of historical events. These experiential memories will be distinguished from non-experiential memories. By non-experiential memories, I mean those memories which are not derived from personal or lived experience of historical events like the Holocaust or colonialism. However, these historical memories are nevertheless drawn upon as part of a broader anti-racist discourse of historical memory. When discussing how personal, group and institutional anti-racist memories intersect, these will be addressed as ‘memory cultures’. Such a definition of memory cultures is influenced by that provided by Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu in their edited work, The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (2006).52 This collection of essays from an international group of contemporary European historians is a crucial contribution to historical understandings of the development of national, cultural and political memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Critically, it recognises the importance of organic memory cultures which develop outside of institutional frameworks, thus challenging national memory cultures. One way of thinking about historical memory, then, is

51 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (London, 2006), p. 121. 52 See Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu (eds.), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (London, 2006).

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to refer to what people remember – or, more accurately, what they think they remember – and to describe efforts by individuals, groups and states to foster or impose memory in the form of interpretations and commemorations.53

Memory is not, therefore, just confined to those official and institutionalised interpretations or commemorations. Remembering the shared experiences and sufferings of a particular group and invoking that past can play an important role in binding communities together. For anti-racists from Jewish and post-colonial communities, the continued reality of racism in late twentieth-century Britain and France contributed to the politicisation of memory. The memories of the Holocaust and European colonialism became, at a time when national understandings of both historical events/processes were under continuing development, crucial features of the anti-racist mindset and a singular challenge to the enduring existence of racial discrimination in the present. If the ‘construction of memory is infused by politics’ then anti-racists can be understood to have moved the history and memory of the Holocaust and British and French colonialism to the centre of the politics of race.54

British and French colonialism and the Holocaust were projects ultimately defined by racism and racist thinking. What happened to the Jews of Europe in the middle of twentieth century and those subjected to colonialism in Asia, India and Africa was the result of popular notions of racial hierarchy and a belief that individual ‘races’ bore distinctive characteristics leading to sharply differing destinies. While Holocaust and colonial memory was present at certain moments between 1980 and 2001, it is important to recognise that this was not always the case. Invoking Holocaust and colonial memory was not always done to the same extent and there was a significant time lapse in the development of and coming to terms with both memories in France and Britain. However, the presence and prioritisation of either memory depended largely on the cultural, ethnic and political identity of individual anti-racist constituencies as well as the events or circumstances to which they were responding. It is not entirely accurate to refer to anti-racism in the singular. There was a plurality of anti-racisms.55 Like memory, anti-racism as a movement was diverse and

53 Ibid., p.7. 54 Ibid., p.4. 55 Bonnett, Anti-Racism, p. 85.

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heterogeneous.56 For example, the break between the Campaign against Racism and Fascism (CARF) and Searchlight magazine in 1990 was, to a significant extent, due to a bitter disagreement over the role of historical memory in anti-racist activism.57 Such an episode (to be explored in chapter 4) did not simply expose the divisions within the British anti-racist movement - which had never quite recaptured the mass popularity and mobilisations of the coalition-oriented Anti-Nazi League (ANL) of 1977 to 1981 – or questions about anti-racist strategy and praxis. It also revealed deep tensions over the role of history and memory within the movement and its efficacy as a means of challenging racisms in the present. On the one hand, memory could be a powerful force for anti-racist mobilisation. The simplicity of the popular anti-racist and anti-fascist slogan ‘Never Again’ or ‘Plus jamais ça!’ conveyed the heavy weight of the racist past and, in particular, memories of the Holocaust and European colonialism. On the other, the split between the CARF and Searchlight perhaps revealed the limitations of anti-racist memory which could be as subject to contestation as the national narrative of the past.

To conclude, it is perilously easy to get bogged down in the more philosophical definitions of historical memory. Notwithstanding the conceptual challenges involved, it is nevertheless important for the sake of clarity to strive towards a working definition. Anti-racist memory cultures of the Holocaust and colonialism will serve as the principal focal points of this thesis. However, the memory traditions of interwar and post-war anti-fascism will also be incorporated as well as the personalised and institutionalised memories of anti-racist movements, organisations and publications. The invocation of Holocaust and colonial memories were highly dependent on the specific context and circumstances in which they challenging contemporary racism. At times, such memories and their associated identities intersected in surprising and powerful ways as they did in May 1990 when the LICRA responded to the flagrant antisemitism of the Carpentras desecration by calling for solidarity with the North African and postcolonial victims of racist murders which took place in France in the same year.58 Memories of the Holocaust, violently conjured during l’affaire Carpentras, possessed the space within which to accommodate and express solidarity with victims of contemporary racism. This suggested that 56 On the heterogeneity of anti-racism, see for instance, Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe, pp. 113-178.57 See ‘Letter to Searchlight’, CARF (January 1991), p.2. 58 Flambée de meurtres et d’agressions racistes’, Le Droit de Vivre (March/April 1990), p. 1.

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anti-racist memory was not a static or immutable phenomenon, but possessed a certain elasticity to the point that Holocaust or colonial memory did not necessarily intersect in multi-directional terms but rather accommodated each other.

Anti-racism and/or anti-fascism?: A Conceptual Dilemma.

This thesis focuses on anti-racism. However, reference will be made to anti-fascism. It is therefore important to define both concepts from the outset in order to set out clearly the strategic and political distinctions between anti-racism and anti-fascism as well as laying out the overlaps between the two movements. This section will explore the various conceptual definitions of the two terms and will set out a basic definition of anti-racism and anti-fascism for this thesis.

There are important geographical distinctions between Britain and France’s anti-fascist traditions and their respective relationships to anti-racism. Historically, anti-fascism was an important tradition in both countries during the interwar period.59 However, it was in Britain that it defined itself – both before, during and after the Second World War – as a more self-conscious movement with a powerful memory culture and legacy of its own. This section will focus primarily on the British dimension as it is in this context that references to anti-fascism and anti-racism were pronounced and, at times, interchangeable. This is not to say that anti-fascism did not exist in France. While the CARF and Searchlight magazine were comfortable labelling themselves as anti-fascist and anti-racist, movements in France such as the LICRA, MRAP and SOS Racisme were more explicitly anti-racist despite the fact that veteran members of the LICRA and the MRAP, such as Jean Pierre-Bloch, had been active in anti-fascist circles in the 1930s.60 The emergence of French anti-fascist organisations like Reflex and Ras l’Front in the early 1990s and publications like Article 31 outside of the traditional currents of French anti-racism were clear responses to the rising political fortunes of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Front National. However, their targets and strategic aims were more

59 For the British case, see Nigel Copsey, Anti-fascism in Britain (Basingstoke, 2000). On the French case, see Catherine Lloyd, Discourses of Antiracism in France (Aldershot, 1998). 60 See Jean-Pierre Allali, Contre les racisme: Les combats de la LICRA (Paris, 2002).

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narrowly focused on taking the fight to the far-right and neo-nazism.61 While the more well-established ‘generalist anti-racist’ organisations like the LICRA and the MRAP were also concerned with resisting the rise of Le Pen, they nevertheless consistently framed their response in terms of l’anti-racisme.62 This, unlike anti-fascism, was underpinned by what Bonnett has called a more fundamental ’discourse of change’ which distinguished the broader, societal, political, cultural and historical aims of anti-racism from the narrower, present-ist focus of anti-fascism.63

Anti-racism is a post-war neologism.64 Jenny Bourne, a former member of the CARF, has sought to make a historical distinction between anti-fascism – the roots of which stretched back to the 1930s – and anti-racism, rooted in the lived experiences of post-colonial immigrants and their descendants in Britain.65 However, the historical truth is more complex than this. While the term ‘anti-racism’ did not come into popular parlance in Britain until the second half of the twentieth century, there had already been strong anticolonial and black-led political organisations at least as old as anti-fascism centred in London during the interwar period.66 In France however, a strong tradition of anti-racism had been in place since the very beginning of the century with the Dreyfus Affair largely recognised as the foundational moment of modern anti-racism.67 Anti-racism thus enjoyed a certain longevity as a French political tradition.68

One of the reasons for anti-fascism’s endurance as a self-conscious movement in postwar Britain was the strength of its memory transmission as well as its tone and content. British anti-fascist memory culture revolved almost exclusively around a triumphant interpretation of its history with the Battle of

61 Lloyd, Discourses of Antiracism in France, p. 89. 62 Lilian Mathieu, ‘The Politicisation of Immigration and Race in France: Towards a Process of Racialisation?’, in Stefano Fella and Carlo Ruzza (eds.), Anti-Racist Movements in the EU: Between Europeanisation and National Trajectories (Basingstoke, 2013), p. 93.63 Bonnett, Anti-racism, p. 89. 64 Ibid., p. 10. 65 Jenny Bourne, ‘CARF: The Life and Times of a Frontline Magazine’, Race & Class, 59:3 (2018), p. 92. 66 See Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Oakland, 2015). 67 See Daniel A. Gordon, ‘Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Search for Common Ground in French Anti-racist Movements since 1898’, in James Renton and Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe: A Shared Story? (London, 2017), pp. 217-266.68 On the variety of France’s political traditions see, Sudhir Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford, 1994).

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Cable Street, the internationalist solidarity of the Spanish volunteers as well as the development of a ‘nationalistic anti-fascism’ though Britain’s struggle against Nazism between 1939 and 1945 elevated anti-fascism to the realm of heroic memory.69 In France, the situation was rather different. As a result of the French Left’s failure to stem the tide of the far-right and antisemitism in the 1930s, despite the moment of optimism that the Popular Front government of 1936 offered, French anti-fascism did not offer the same legacy of victory or triumph in the post-war period after the dissolution of the Third Republic for the establishment of the Vichy regime.

Cathie Lloyd draws a clear distinction between anti-fascism and anti-racism.70 Furthermore, while Lloyd has argued that there is an overlap between the two with anti-fascism serving as “a central reference point” for anti-racists, the two should not be treated interchangeably.71 Extending this line of thought, Alana Lentin has argued that despite the difficulty in distinguishing between the two, anti-racism goes further than anti-fascism in its identification of the perpetrators of racism. Like anti-fascists, anti-racists also oppose and campaign against the racism of the far-right but they do not limit their activism solely to this sphere of influence. Anti-racism “conceives of racism multiply”, identifying and condemning institutional racism - in the housing market, employment and education opportunities – at large.72 In setting their sights on and beyond the racism of the British National Party (BNP) or the Front National, anti-racists thus have a broader vision of activism that ranged from the fringes to the mainstream of contemporary political culture. Lentin has also argued that organizations that self-identify as anti-fascist tend to ground themselves “squarely in a patriotic discourse inspired by past struggles waged in the name of national liberation from Nazism or fascism”.73 Searchlight magazine is a conspicuous example of this with its appeals to the anti-fascism of the interwar period and the national anti-fascism of Britain’s fight against Nazism in the Second World War. Anti-racists in Europe share in this inheritance.

There are clear points therefore, at which anti-racism and anti-fascism overlap as well as diverge. In terms of activism, both opposed the far-right 69 Tony Kushner, ‘Remembering to Forget: Racism and Anti-Racism in Postwar Britain’. in Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (eds.), Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’ (Oxford, 1998), p. 231. 70 See Lloyd, Discourses of Anti-Racism in France (London, 1998). 71 Lloyd, Discourses of Antiracism in France, p. 89.72 Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe, p. 219. 73 Ibid., p. 218.

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though anti-racism moves beyond anti-fascism in adopting a much broader definition of racism. It is in the realm of memory culture however, that anti-fascism and anti-racism share a significant degree of common ground. Both anti-racism and anti-fascist prioritise and place emphasis on the necessity of mass mobilisation.74 Lentin has made the point that the Holocaust served as a “lynchpin…of discourse” for anti-racists in France, whereas in Britain, Holocaust memory was more likely to be found within anti-fascist circles, using the ANL and Searchlight magazine as examples.75 However, this draws too sharp a distinction between anti-racism and anti-fascism in the British context. Searchlight did not self-identify as exclusively anti-fascist, indeed for several years in the 1980s the magazine’s sub-title was “[T]he anti-fascist and anti-racist monthly’ while its editorials repeatedly stressed its commitment to tackling the “twin evils of racism and fascism”.76 This makes it hard to draw a clean line between anti-racism and anti-fascism. It is apparent that one cannot truly exist without the other and that both rely on each other for their efficacy.

There has been no shortage of criticism of anti-fascism by anti-racists. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, frustration was expressed by anti-racist activists who accused anti-fascists – particularly those of the physical force tradition – of prioritising the struggle against the far-right at the expense of the struggle against racism. Serious debates raged between and among anti-fascists and anti-racists over the extent to which both should converge or diverge in order to achieve their respective social and political goals. The CARF – whose organisational biography can be found below - accused anti-fascists of regarding racism as an ‘incidental’ feature of neo-fascist organisation:

anti-fascist activists tend on the one hand to ignore state racism and, on the other, to treat racial violence as though it were a by-product, a sub-category, of fascism. Hence anti-fascist literature often transmits a simplistic message: get rid of the fascists and racial violence will magically disappear too.77

Disagreements over the prominence of anti-fascist memory culture in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in growing tensions and accusations by activists that anti-fascism was prioritised over anti-racism. Such tensions were a significant factor

74 Lloyd, Discourses of Antiracism in France, p 98. 75 Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe, pp. 219-220. 76 ‘Editorial’, Searchlight, Issue 171 (September 1989) p. 2. 77 ‘Racial violence: challenging old orthodoxies’, CARF (January/February 1992), pp. 3-4.

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in the failure to create let alone sustain a united anti-fascist and anti-racist movement in Britain, especially in the wake of the immensely successful initiatives of the 1970s.78 Pleas were frequently made by members of the political left for differences to be set aside in order to create a new and effective movement. In January 1982, Searchlight published letters from readers with proposals of how to rebuild a national anti-fascist and anti-racist movement. Mike Allen, who had been the secretary of the Merseyside Anti-Nazi League, criticised what he saw as the ‘London centrism of left and other anti-racist organisations’ and called for the creation of a movement with ‘strong local roots and a local orientation’.79 A letter from Ted Eames in Oxford suggested that Searchlight organise a conference with the intention of launching a new national anti-fascist and anti-racist movement because they were ‘the only body with enough credibility to pull it off’.80 Three years later, writing in Marxism Today, Dave Cook called for the labour movement to become a ‘genuinely anti-racist force’.81

The CARF was especially critical of the fact that the fight against racism was ‘subsumed…to the fight against fascism’82. It was this tension over the relationship between anti-racism and anti-fascism that led to the CARF breaking with Searchlight magazine in October 1990. The CARF had long held that the fight against racism and fascism should be waged in equal measure but was increasingly critical of what they regarded as Searchlight’s ‘narrowing conceptualisation of anti-fascism’ which prioritised taking the fight to the far-right over resisting racism on a broader societal, political and cultural scale.83 This split, driven in part by differences over the role of historical memory in anti-fascist and anti-racist activism over the course of the 1990s, will explored in further detail in Chapter Four of this thesis. The tendency to prioritise anti-fascism over anti-racism has been mirrored, directly and indirectly, by historians who have written on the history of anti-fascism in Britain with little or, at least, not enough reference to anti-racism.84 While anti-fascism is the

78 See David Renton, When we touched the sky: The Anti-Nazi League, 1977-1981 (Cheltenham, 2005). 79 Mike Allen, ‘Letter’, Searchlight (January 1982), p 19. 80 Ted Eames, ‘Letter’, Searchlight (January 1982), p. 19. 81 Dave Cook, ‘The Politics of Despair’, Marxism Today (November 1985), p. 27. 82 ‘CARF is Back: Letter to Searchlight’, CARF (February/March 1991), p. 2. 83 Bourne, ‘CARF: The Life and Times of a Frontline Magazine’, Race and Class (2018), p. 92. 84 See Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain (Basingstoke, 2000): Renton, When we touched the sky (Cheltenham, 2005).

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subject of a currently growing literature in historical circles, for a full historical understanding of these movements, it is imperative that anti-racism should become a subject of equal historical attention. If anti-fascism is the motorcycle speeding head-first into the fascists, then anti-racism has, for too long, been confined to the sidecar.

To conclude, this thesis will not seek to prise anti-racism and anti-fascism apart from each other. As suggested above, one cannot exist without the other and they are, to a certain degree, co-dependent. However, as the primary subject of study for this thesis, anti-racism and, in particular, its history, memory and legacy - will be at the forefront. While recognising the distinctive features and histories of both traditions, this thesis will approach both with some conceptual flexibility. While this may be far from satisfactory for some, it will have the benefit, I hope, of recognising the entwined histories of both traditions in France and, especially, Britain.

Anti-racist organisations and publications

On both sides of the Channel, there were significant similarities and differences between anti-racisms. As Catherine Lloyd has noted, anti-racism can only be understood in its historical, socio-economic and culturally specific contexts.85 In light of this, it is important to position anti-racist movements and their associated historical actors within the national and historical contexts in which they operated. Such contexts largely determined the concerns and priorities of anti-racists and shaped their responses to contemporary events in significant ways. Moreover, as this is a study of anti-racist memory cultures of the Holocaust and colonialism, the similarities and differences between the respective national histories of Britain and France will be highlighted in relation to both spheres of memory.

Questions may be raised about the decision to focus on two of the more well-established French anti-racist movements, the MRAP and the LICRA. There has been a tendency in English-language literature on French anti-racism to place a heavy focus on the highly popular, media-savvy and telegenic SOS Racisme which emerged in 1984 and went on to hold major rock concerts in Paris attended by hundreds of thousands sporting the organisation’s badge 85 Lloyd, ‘L’action anti-raciste en France et en Grande-Bretagne’, in Rea (ed.), Immigration et racisme en Europe, p. 76.

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bearing the words ‘Touche pas à mon pote!’.86 There is no doubt that SOS Racisme was one of the most immediately recognisable French anti-racist movements for observers elsewhere. However, this disproportionate emphasis comes at the expense of other long-standing French anti-racist organisations. Compared to SOS Racisme, there has been significantly less English-language literature on the entwined histories of the MRAP and the LICRA, both of which were deeply rooted in the interwar and war-time experiences of antisemitism, persecution and Holocaust and yet pursued their distinct struggles against racism in the post-war period. To the north of the Channel, there is an understandable tendency for the history of anti-racism and anti-fascism to pay close attention to the 1970s and, in particular, the mass political and cultural movements of Rock against Racism (RAR) and the Anti-Nazi League (ANL). Alongside a closer examination of the state of anti-racism in Britain in the afterglow of the mass movements of the late 1970s, it is worth looking at the roles played by smaller outfits such as the CARF and prominent anti-racist/anti-fascist publications such as Searchlight as well as their own institutional historical memories.

It is important to highlight that this thesis comprises a largely textual approach to the source material. While oral history offers a wealth of information about the recent past, I chose to focus principally on anti-racist print media because anti-racist magazines, journals, pamphlets and newspapers were crucial discursive spaces within which memory cultures were constructed, articulated and contested. Close inspection and interrogation of anti-racist print media, from Le Droit de Vivre to Searchlight, offers a highly valuable insight into the sheer diversity of anti-racist responses to contemporary events and their own historical memory cultures.87 While this thesis does not rely exclusively on print media for its source material (for example, visual images

86 See, for instance, Peter Fysh and Jim Wolfreys, The Politics of Racism in France (Basingstoke, 2003); Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe (London, 2004); 87 The Searchlight Archives at the University of Northampton was especially resourceful, holding as it did all back copies of Searchlight since its founding in 1975. It also holds a good deal of supplementary material on other anti-racist outfits in Britain and, though to a lesser extent, in France. The George Padmore Institute in London holds back-copies of the CARF magazine. There are digitized archives for the CARF magazine, available via the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) website (see http://www.irr.org.uk/resources/carf-magazine-archive-1991-2003/). Furthermore, the MRAP has an abundant archive online for accessing the back catalogue of Droit et Liberté and Différences (see https://archives.mrap.fr/mediawiki/index.php/Accueil). To consult the LICRA’s Le Droit de Vivre, I made extensive use of the LICRA collections as well as other anti-racist materials at La Contemporaine in Paris.

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and song lyrics are also used), its emphasis is nevertheless on anti-racist literature as a platform for expressions and discussions of anti-racist memory cultures. Sometimes these memories were personal, as in the case of figures such as Pierre-Bloch and Ludmer, and were woven into the institutional fabric of their respective anti-racist organisations. Therefore, it must be borne in mind that the personal memories of certain activists were not necessarily shared or representative of the memory culture of individual anti-racist organisations as a whole. Furthermore, there is an important distinction to be drawn between the memories of individuals active in anti-racist circles with personal experience of the Holocaust or colonialism and those who drew upon these memories without having personally experienced these historical events and processes.

Two principle challenges confronted during the research for this thesis have involved acquiring circulation figures of anti-racist publications and identifying the authors of particular articles and reports. The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) does not have circulation figures for either Race & Class between 1980 and 2000, nor for CARF magazine following its split from Searchlight in the early 1990s. While Nigel Copsey has established that Searchlight magazine was selling around 5000 copies in the late 1970s, it has not been possible to confirm circulation figures beyond that period.88 Similarly for the LICRA’s Le Droit de Vivre and the MRAP’s Différences and Droit et Liberté, it has not been possible ascertain the relevant circulation figures.89

While care has been taken to accurately attribute authorship of editorials, articles and essays in anti-racist publications where the author’s identity has not been disclosed in the original text, it has not always been possible – even after contacting anti-racist organisations - to retrospectively confirm the identity of authors and contributors. Where the author of a report, article, editorial or interview in any of the anti-racist publications consulted in this thesis has been identified in the original text, they have been cited accordingly.

88 Copsey, Anti-fascism in Britain, p. 140. 89 Despite persistence, it was one of the more frustrating aspects of research that I was unable to establish more clearly the circulation and even membership figures of certain organisations. To some extent, this difficulty is simply due to the fact that little to no records were kept of circulation figures by smaller outfits like Searchlight or the CARF. I contacted the MRAP and the LICRA but received no responses to my enquiries about circulation figures and membership in the 1980s and 1990s. This is unfortunate as it would be extremely illuminating to see how many people were, on average, engaged with the materials being produced by anti-racist organisations. Furthermore, it would also highlight the extent of the readership or membership’s engagement with and contributions to the anti-racist memory cultures of respective organisations.

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Where identity of an author has not been provided in any of the sources, the article or report has been cited in full without the author’s name. This thesis has made use of journal editorials, usually (though not always) written by the leader or senior membership of the movement. Editorials often outlined the official position of the movement in response to political developments, racist incidents or anniversaries. Within the publications, however, space was provided for the expression of a broad range of outlooks on contemporary anti-racism through debates, letters pages and opinion pieces. In some publications, such as Searchlight, the authors of specific editorials, articles and opinion pieces remained anonymous. This was due, to a significant extent, to the dangers of reporting on the activities of the far-right. Identifying the authors of exposés could place them in danger of far-right retaliation. Only where the author’s identity has been acknowledged in the original text has a full citation been given. By the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, authors began to be identified more frequently in the magazine’s pages. While I have tried to be as accurate as possible in my citations, I take full responsibility for any misidentifications or misattributions of a source to the wrong author.

.

MRAP

The MRAP was founded in 1949. Its original membership was deeply rooted in the Parisian Jewish community whose wartime experience of persecution, deportation and resistance had profoundly shaped and reinforced their commitment to fighting antisemitism and developing ‘community self-defence’.90 A number of the founding members such as Charles Palant, who served as the MRAP’s general secretary between 1950 and 1971, were Holocaust survivors. Indeed, Palant recalled decades later how the birth of the MRAP on the 22 May 1949 was borne out of the vivid memory of ‘des crimes hitlériens’.91 From its inception, the MRAP enjoyed close ties with the Parti communiste français (PCF), an association that would cause tensions with one of the MRAP’s fellow anti-racist organisations, the LICA. With its roots in the French Jewish community, the MRAP was originally primarily focused on fighting antisemitism and preventing the resurgence of the far-right. In 1977, the organisation underwent a name change from Mouvement contre le racisme, l’antisémitisme

90 Lloyd, Discourses of Antiracism in France, p. 21. 91 Charles Palant, ‘Une inoubliable journée’, Droit et Liberté (July 1974), p. 3.

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et pour la paix to Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples. By dropping the reference to antisemitism, the MRAP was demonstrating its broad interpretation of racism with antisemitism as just one among many variants of racist prejudice.92 Fighting antisemitism as part of the broader struggle against racism reflected the MRAP’s universalist anti-racist discourse which was influenced to a significant extent by its association with the PCF and a commitment to Marxism.93 In contrast to the LICA which, in the immediate post-war years, strengthened its commitment to fighting antisemitism, the MRAP took a strong anticolonial stance during the 1950s. It also condemned the colonial racism and ‘violence inouïe’ which claimed dozens of Algerian lives on the streets of Paris on 17 October 1961.94 Mouloud Aounit’s leadership of the MRAP between 1989 and 2008 continued the MRAP’s commitment to fighting anti-Maghrebi racism in France.

The MRAP was extremely prolific. The first edition of Droit et Liberté, which became the MRAP’s monthly publication actually predated the official establishment of the MRAP by just over a year, describing itself as ‘le grand hebdomadaire de la vie juive’, before becoming the main outlet of the MRAP from 1949 onwards.95 The MRAP’s annual conference decided in November 1987 to continue Droit et Liberté in the form of the MRAP’s newer publication Différences.96 Différences was launched in December 1980, partly in response to the rue Copernic bombing two months before. The purpose of Différences, according to Albert Lévy, who was general secretary from 1971 to 1989, was primarily to reach a broader public audience. However, the MRAP also saw Différences as an opportunity to capitalise on the large anti-racist mobilisations that emerged in the aftermath of the bombing.97 From its founding issue, Différences displayed a remarkably broad range of interests. From reports on the lived experiences of Turkish gastarbeiter in West Germany to the exploration of Rastafarian youth culture in France, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa to detailed guides on the far-right in England, Différences was cosmopolitan in outlook and broadly universalist in its approach

92 Gordon, ‘Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Search for Common Ground in French Anti-racist Movements since 1898’, in Renton and Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, p. 230. 93 Lloyd, Discourses of Antiracism in France, p. 93. 94 Albert Lévy, ‘Pas de ça chez nous!’, Droit et Liberté (November 1961), p. 1. 95 Droit et Liberté (February 1948), p.1. 96 ‘Spécial congrès’, Droit et Liberté (December 1987), p. 1. 97 Albert Lévy, ‘Editorial’, Droit et Liberté, (November-December 1980), p. 5.

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to racism. The journal featured articles from French activists and intellectuals such as Alain Finkielkraut and Pierre-André Taguieff – both of whom would go on to enjoy high profiles in French intellectual circles - who contributed features on antisemitism, Zionism as well as the controversy over Robert Faurisson’s trivialisation and denial of the Holocaust in the early 1980s.98 Différences published debates, with the big questions of the day posed to academics, politicians, scientists and activists. A history section covered a broad range of topics, reflecting the importance of history for contemporary understandings of racism. In the February 1982 issue alone, there were articles on the history of antisemitism in Poland and the role of historical memory in shaping contemporary resentments as well as an essay marking the twentieth anniversary of the Charonne métro massacre.99 Such articles sought to connect racism past and present and self-consciously positioned the MRAP’s own history within a distinctly historically-conscious anti-racism.

The MRAP held regular annual conferences at which developments in racism and anti-racism in France were discussed. These were also opportunities for members to put forward proposals for some of the key themes and focuses of anti-racist activism in the following year. As a means of maximising the engagement of the membership with the organisation’s direction of travel and agenda, members would be informed of some of the main points for discussion in advance of conferences.100 The general secretary usually wrote a report following the conferences to be publicised to its members.101 These kinds of reports – which will be referenced at various points throughout the thesis in the cases of the MRAP and the LICRA – charted the changes in the organisation’s outlook, reflected shifts in national political culture and responded to contemporary events.

LICRA

98 See Alain Finkelkraut, ‘Le racisme est-il naturel?’, Différences, (October 1983), pp. 36-37: ‘Des Juifs et l’antisémitisme’, Différences, (October 1981) and Différences (December 1980). 99 See Michel Thiot, ‘En Pologne, on reparle d’antisémitisme’ and Gilles Richard, ‘La mort dans le Métro’, in Différences (February 1982). 100 See for example, ‘Thèmes de réflexion soumis à tous les adhérents’, Droit et Liberte (February 1985), p. 3. 101 See for example, Albert Lévy, ‘Libérer la France du racisme’, Droit et Liberté (May/June 1982), pp. 5-7.

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The Ligue internationale contre l’antisémitisme (LICA) was founded in 1927 by French Jews not just in response to antisemitism but also, as Daniel A. Gordon has put it, ‘in defence of an act of terrorism’.102 The LICA was created in the midst of the Schwarzbard affair, a murder trial following the fatal shooting of Simon Petlioura, former leader of nationalist government in Ukraine, by Sholom Schwarzbard in May 1926.103 Schwarzbard, a Ukrainian Jew, whose family had been killed during pogroms in the Ukrainian National Republic in 1919, held Petlioura responsible for the persecution. Initially called the Ligue contre les pogroms, the organisation under Bernard Lecache who served as the president from its founding to 1968, published a monthly journal called Le Droit de Vivre – later self-described as the ‘oldest anti-racist newspaper in the world’ - which documented instances of antisemitism and far-right activity in France.

From its inception, the LICA’s primary focus was on tackling antisemitism in the aftermath of the attempted destruction of Europe’s Jews. The LICA was committed to anti-racism in general but to anti-antisemitism in particular. This was in spite of its own name change in 1979 which incorporated the word ‘racisme’ so that it became the Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme (LICRA). Le Droit de Vivre would report now and again on instances of racism and violence towards North Africans in France, but such instances received significantly less coverage than instances of antisemitism. It was the experience of French Jews, their national and cultural identity and the role of Israel and the Holocaust in shaping these that primarily concerned the LICRA. Like the MRAP, the membership and leadership of the LICRA in the post-war period was primarily made up of those who had survived the Vichy regime and Holocaust. The memory of the Holocaust thus infused the anti-racism of the LICRA under the leadership of Jean Pierre-Bloch in a profound way.104 The intersection between the history of France’s experience of the Second World War and the LICRA’s institutional history is integral to understanding its approach to anti-racism in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

102 Gordon, ‘Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Search for Common Ground in French Anti-racist Movements since 1898’, in Renton and Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, p. 226. 103 For more on the Schwarzbard Affair see Yosef Nedava, ‘Some aspects of Individual Terrorism: ACase Study of the Schwarzbard Affair’, in Yonah Alexander and Kenneth Myers (eds.), Terrorism in Europe (London, 1982), pp. 29-39. 104 See, for instance, Jean Pierre-Bloch, ‘Pour un avenir fidèle à un riche passé’, Le Droit de Vivre (June-July 1992), p.1.

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Despite sharing certain similarities with the MRAP, there was a historically-rooted divergence between the two organisations borne out of fundamental political disagreement. The LICRA was considerably less left-wing than the MRAP (and, indeed, many of the British anti-racist publications/organisations to be examined in this thesis). At times, this ideological dispute rose to the fore as in 1986 when, in an editorial of Le Droit de Vivre, the MRAP was described in passing as having been founded by those who followed the political line of Moscow leading to a sharp rebuttal from the MRAP’s president, George Pau-Langevin.105 While the anti-racist priorities of the MRAP and the LICRA differed, the histories of both organisations were nevertheless entwined reflecting both the stabilisation and eventual fragmentation of ideology in France over the course of the post-war period. This acknowledgement of shared histories and shared anti-racist visions materialised when both organisations came together at demonstrations and rallies in response to incidents of racial injustices and racist violence in France in the 1980s and 1990s.

As both the LICRA and the MRAP were similar in organisations style, annual conferences were also important to the LICRA as opportunities for setting the agenda for the following year and raising awareness of contemporary issues.106 An indication of just how important these events were to the LICRA can be seen in the attendance of high-profile keynote speakers such as Elie Wiesel and Simone Veil.107

Searchlight

Searchlight was ‘born of need’: not once, but twice.108 In 1964, Searchlight had been launched in response to the formation of the National Socialist Movement. An intermittent publication, its original editors were two Labour MPs, Reg Freeson and Joan Lestor, aided by the ‘collaborative effort’ between Maurice Ludmer and research director, Gerry Gable.109 The first incarnation of the anti-fascist newspaper was, however, short-lived, lasting until 1967. It was

105 Editorial, ‘Unité et consensus’, Le Droit de Vivre (November 1986-1987), p. 1. 106 See, for example, ‘XXXIVe congrès de la LICRA’, Le Droit de Vivre (December 1981). 107 See ‘XXXVe Congrès National de LICRA’, Le Droit de Vivre (December 1984). See also, XXXVIII Congrès National de la LICRA’, Le Droit de Vivre (December 1990 – January 1991). 108 ‘100 Months of Searchlight’, Searchlight (October 1983), p. 2. 109 Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, p. 121.

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relaunched in February 1975 under the editorship of Ludmer as a monthly outlet and as part of the fight against the National Front (NF) which had been founded in 1968. Identifying anti-racism and anti-fascism as political and moral necessities, the new Searchlight’s primary aim was to expose the inherent fascism of the NF. Ludmer’s principle concern was ‘not so much to describe or analyse contemporary British fascism, but to win the argument that it existed’.110 Searchlight did this by exposing the networks, correspondence and activities of the British far-right, from the NF to Combat 18. The publication played a crucial role for the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) - of which Searchlight was an early supporter when it was founded in 1977 – by supplying and circulating photographs of the NF leaders, John Tyndall and Martin Webster, in Nazi uniform.111 The memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust lay at the very heart of Searchlight’s understanding of anti-racism and, in particular, anti-fascism. From its inception and through the 1980s, Searchlight was remarkably well-informed on the latest instances of racist discrimination, attacks, murders and arsons across Britain. While it was chiefly focused on monitoring the far-right in Britain and across Europe, it was also concerned with raising public awareness of the consequences of racism for its human targets. That being said, there was a tendency for Searchlight to focus more on the perpetrators of racism than on its victims. Searchlight, like the ANL, would also be criticised for the dominance of its memory culture of the Second World War and the Holocaust.112

Race & Class

Race & Class was a product of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) which had been established in 1958 as an independent body intended to ‘research, publish and collect resources on race relations’.113 By 1972, the IRR underwent a dramatic overhaul from a policy-based and academically-oriented institution to a politically engaged anti-racist thinktank.114 Ambalavaner Sivanandan, the founding editor of Race & Class, had been a particularly critical voice from

110 ‘100 Months of Searchlight’, Searchlight (October 1983), p. 2. 111 Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, p. 134. 112 Lloyd, ‘L’action anti-raciste en France et en Grande-Bretagne’, in Rea (ed.), Immigration et racisme en Europe, p. 85: for a broader reflection on the limits of anti-fascist and anti-Nazi memory culture in the anti-racist struggle, see Paul Gilroy, There ain’t no black in the Union Jack, pp. 131-135. 113 IRR, ‘About’: http://www.irr.org.uk/about/ [Last accessed 14/07/2019].114 Ibid.

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within the IRR and had called for the institute to become more pro-active and assertive in its approach to questions of ‘race relations’.115 Race & Class was preoccupied with analysing and connecting the place of black workers within the wider working class movement, its oppression and to the ‘liberation struggles in the underdeveloped world’.116 The anti-racist activism of the contributors to Race & Class was of a distinctly intellectual tone, with an emphasis on the importance of ‘thinking in order to do’.117 Contributors to Race & Class in the 1980s had been profoundly shaped by overlapping radical political trends of the late 1960s, from the Black power movement to pan-Africanism. Indeed, the abounding references to ‘Third World-ism’ and American imperialism were redolent of the political language of the ’68 years.118 Given Race & Class’ propensity to contextualise racism and anti-racism within a broader global setting, its invocation of colonial memory is of interest to this thesis. In particular, Sivanandan’s intimate understanding of the connection between the colonial past and post-colonial present and its centrality to understanding contemporary racism was crucial to the development of a distinctive anti-racist colonial memory culture.

Campaign against Racism and Fascism (CARF)

The CARF emerged out of a convergence of anti-racist and anti-fascist groupings and its first publication emerged in 1976.119 Three years later, for financial reasons, the publication was incorporated into Searchlight magazine as a monthly ‘four-page anti-racist supplement’. The CARF section reported on instances of racial discrimination and violence across Britain, and sought to develop understandings of racism as both an institutional and social phenomenon. The publication approached issues of racism by combining an anti-racist and anti-fascist perspective. The CARF section carried interviews with prominent anti-racist and black community activists and listed monthly instances of racist violence and injustice. Its main priority was to report on ‘the lived experience on the ground of the harshest manifestations of racism that

115 Evan Smith, ‘Conflicting Narratives of Black Youth Rebellion in Modern Britain’, in Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World, 2:1 (2010), p. 19. 116 Ambalavaner Sivanandan, ‘Editorial’, Race & Class (January 1975), p. 231. 117 Ibid., p. 231. 118 See, for example, Anandi Ramamurthy, Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movements (London, 2013). 119 Jenny Bourne, ‘CARF: the life and times of a frontline magazine’, Race & Class, Vol. 59:3 (January 2018), p. 93; see also Copsey, Anti-fascism in Britain, p. 139.

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had to be exposed’.120 The emphasis on the ‘lived experience’ of the victims of racism helped CARF stand out in a number of ways. Questions of ‘race’ and racism were not dealt with in abstract academic terms as they were in the pages of Race & Class. Nor was the CARF overly preoccupied with the political and ideological leanings of the perpetrators of racist rhetoric and violence as Searchlight was. This allowed CARF to distinguish itself as both anti-racist and anti-fascist while paying attention to the personal and human cost of racism and xenophobia. This did not, however, compromise the sophistication of the CARF’s detailed analyses of the latest immigration legislation in Britain or the consequences of European integration for asylum seekers.121 The CARF’s features on the nature of institutional racism, the New Right and the impact of economic policy on ethnic minority communities in Britain reflected the CARF’s commitment to a more sophisticated understanding the shifting and dynamic nature of racism.

In 1990, Searchlight and the CARF parted ways as a result of differences of perspective over points of anti-racist strategy.122 The CARF had also been increasingly concerned by what it saw as Searchlight’s prioritisation of the fight against antisemitism over other forms of racism. However, as will be explored in chapter four, this split was also as a result of disagreement with Searchlight’s historical memory culture and its application to the struggle against racism at the dawn of the 1990s.This memory dispute had implications for the directions the CARF and Searchlight took in the 1990s and raised broader issues about the role of contested memories in anti-racist activism.

Chapter Outlines

This thesis makes three fundamental arguments. First, that historical memories of the Holocaust and European colonialism were central to late twentieth-century anti-racist thought and practice. Anti-racist print media provided a valuable discursive space within which memory cultures of the Holocaust and colonialism could be articulated and contested. Second, I argue that it is not enough to examine the histories of British and French anti-racism within the boundaries of the nation-state. Rather, they must be situated and historicised within a broader European context. To this end, the anti-racist ‘turn to Europe’ 120 Bourne, ‘CARF’, Race & Class (January 2018), p. 95. 121 See CARF (January/February 1993) and (November/December 1992). 122 Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, p. 166.

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between 1988 and 1995 represented a moment of expansion in the temporal, mental and memorial priorities of anti-racists in Britain and France. Finally, anti-racist memory cultures did not exist in a vacuum but constituted a fixture in British and French civil society. They engaged with and developed alongside contemporary developments in national memory and political culture. Anti-racist memory cultures weren’t just spaces for anti-racists to remember and even contest memories. They were part of a broader attempt to engage anti-racist activism with events and developments in contemporary society.

Chapter One examines anti-racist Holocaust memory in the 1980s and assesses how events such as the rue Copernic synagogue bombing of October 1980 and the rue des Rosiers attack of August 1982 served as the catalyst for contested articulations of anti-racist Holocaust memories in France. Crucially, the chapter examines how anti-racist Holocaust memory developed and was expressed in various ways on both sides of the Channel. It argues that Holocaust memory was, by and large, the default historical memory of anti-racists in response to contemporary racism. However, the frame of reference in which the Holocaust was understood and remembered was primarily national in scope. Chapter Two situates anti-racism between 1980 and 1991 in a post-colonial context and considers how colonial memory was expressed and utilised in the struggle against contemporary racism. It makes the case that anti-racist colonial memory in France and especially in Britain was fragmentary in nature. Due to the dominant presence of the Holocaust in the anti-racist landscape, colonial memory struggled to achieve the same degree of recognition. This chapter will also explore how anti-racist intellectuals such as Stuart Hall and Ambalavaner Sivanandan explicitly drew connections between the colonial past and racism in the present thus contributing to the creation of a peculiarly anti-racist temporality. Chapter Three makes the case that critiques of anti-racism (both within and outside anti-racist circles) were based, to a significant degree, on misgivings about anti-racist approaches to the past and, in particular to memory. It also explores Taguieff’s concept of ‘commemorative anti-racism’123 and its limits in the context of the neo-republican turn in France by the end of the 1980s.

The final two chapters of this thesis bring anti-racist Holocaust and colonial memories together in synthesis while also arguing for the expansion of 123 Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘Reflexion: Repenser le racisme et l’anti-racisme’, Le Droit de Vivre (November 1988), p. 2.

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British and French anti-racist horizons on a European and global scale. Chapter Four argues that anti-racism in Britain and France underwent a ‘European turn’ between the late 1980s and mid-1990s. This chapter argues that this was a significant historical moment of expansion for the anti-racist horizon. This is not to say that anti-racists were uninterested in or ignorant of European affairs before this point but that the geopolitical transformations at the dawn of the 1990s changed the context in which anti-racists operated. Despite mixed and ambivalent anti-racist responses to the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War, there was a greater push towards building cross-border networks (though the success of such initiatives was not always guaranteed) and thinking on a transnational scale. In Chapter Five, the focus opens up to explore the ‘tentative’ encounters between Holocaust and colonial memory. Alongside an increasingly European and global outlook, memories of the Holocaust and European colonialism started to converge. This chapter examines how anti-racists began to reflect more deeply on the connections between the Holocaust and the legacy of European colonialism. The 1990s was a period in which there was greater space for anti-racist Holocaust memory to prise open, tease out and inform colonial memory in different ways. Anti-racists such as the MRAP’s Albert Lévy expressed his hopes for a greater engagement between the two memory spheres and for France’s complex colonial legacy to be addressed in a similar way to the country’s legacy of collaboration. On the other hand, there were significant contextual differences and time lapses between the developing spheres of memory. While anti-racists on both sides of the Channel shared some common points of historical reference which suggested a broader European anti-racist memory culture, they were also contingent upon the highly particular national contexts in which the historical memory of empire and colonialism operated.

Chapter One

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‘ L’histoire prend son temps .’: Anti-racist Holocaust memory, c. 1980-1989

‘Memory, they claim, is nothing but a form of vigilance.’124

Alain Finkielkraut

Between the 11 May and 4 July 1987, Klaus Barbie, the infamous ‘butcher of Lyons’, was brought to trial in France. He stood accused, among other things, of crimes against humanity for his role in the mass deportations of Jews during the Second World War as well as the violence and torture he inflicted upon his victims as head of the local Gestapo. The public interest in the trial, inside and outside of France, and its pedagogic function marked a watershed moment in the development of French memories about the Second World War.125 More than forty years after the Occupation and the Holocaust, Barbie represented history in the dock. At the time of the trial, the head of the LICRA, Jean Pierre-Bloch, wrote in the organisation’s newspaper, Le Droit de Vivre, celebrating the trial as the first real indictment of Nazism in Occupied France. Expressing both relief that Barbie was to be brought to justice and a measure of frustration with the decades-long delay, the editorial mused that ‘History takes its time’.126

So too did memory. The development of Holocaust memory from something hitherto preserved within the surviving Jewish communities across Western Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war to its eventual absorption within national narratives and its universalisation as a moral and historical point of reference was complex and tortuous.127 As public awareness of the Holocaust grew in Western Europe, meeting with varying degrees of shame, denial and anger, others viewed it – and had done so for some time – as a spur to action. The Holocaust began, as Cecile Felicia Stokholm Banke has noted, to serve 124 Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, trans. Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff (London, 1994), p. 55.125 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Paris, 1987), p. 211.126 Editorial, ‘Plus jamais ça!’, in Le Droit de Vivre, April-May 1987, p. 1.127 See Cecilie Felicia Stokholm Banke, ‘Remembering Europe’s Heart of Darkness: Legacies of the Holocaust in Post-war European Societies’, in Pakier and Stråth (eds.), A European Memory? (Oxford, 2010). See also, Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London, 2005).

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as a benchmark for what Europe should be and for what it must avoid becoming. It sounds a warning against nationalism, xenophobia, ethnic cleansing and persecution on the grounds of culture, race or religion.128

Yet well before this broader universalisation of the Holocaust and the moral lessons extracted from it, anti-racists invoked the memory of the Holocaust for didactic purposes, cautioning society against the insidious consequences of racism and where it could lead. Indeed, the Holocaust contributed to the formation of what Alana Lentin has described as a teleology of racism with the Holocaust serving as its murderously logical end-point.129

For many anti-racists in Britain and France, the Holocaust constituted, in different ways, a cornerstone of their activism in spite of the very different experiences of each country in the Second World War. Indeed, the significance of Holocaust memory cuture among British anti-racists in the 1970s and 1980s is somewhat curious considering Britain’s geographical distance from the carrying out of the Holocaust in east-central Europe. The emergence of Holocaust consciousness in Britain was not a linear process but, from the mid-1970s onwards, one of obsessive peaks and forgetful, if not indifferent, troughs.130 The centrality of Holocaust memory culture in British anti-racist activism depended largely upon the different communities within which different anti-racist organisations and actors originated. The triumphant national narrative and popular memories of the Second World War also shaped certain anti-racist understandings of the Holocaust, relying at times upon some rather crude understandings of the Holocaust itself: as something Germans did to German Jews, as opposed to understanding the Holocaust in broader transnational terms. This can be accounted for largely by reference to Britain’s experiential distance from the events of the Holocaust and to the fact that, in the national imagination, Britain’s enemy was singular: the ‘good war’ had been against Nazi Germany, and Nazi Germany alone.131 Having avoided occupation, mass deportations or significant domestic unrest, Britain’s experience of the

128 Banke, ‘Remembering Europe’s Heart of Darkness’, in Pakier and Stråth (eds.), A European Memory?, p. 169 129 Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe, p. 221-222.130 Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (Abingdon, 2014), p. 1. 131 Mark Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow, 2004), pp. 283-284.

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Second World War stood significantly apart from that of its continental neighbours.

On the other side of the Channel, the development of Holocaust memory was a more complex and traumatic affair. By the early 1980s, Holocaust memory had already become a permanent fixture within French public awareness.132 During the Occupation, 76,000 French and foreign-born Jews were deported to the East between the first deportations in 1942 to the liberation of France in 1944. A third of the French Jewish community perished.133 The French state and security forces played an active – at times, enthusiastic – role in rounding up Jews for deportation. In the post-war period, the primacy of the Gaullist myth of national resistance and the priorities of reconstruction stifled national conversation about the legacy of Vichy and of the Jewish experience of the Second World War.134 This is not, however, to say that silence prevailed. Among survivors and the French Jewish community at large, Holocaust memory loomed large within Jewish consciousness and was transmitted within communities and families through the generations.135 The 1960s and 1970s were formative decades in the development of Holocaust memory culture.136 Furthermore, the Eichmann Trial of 1961 and Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 were watershed moments in the resurfacing of Jewish Holocaust memory and the increasingly public assertion of Jewish identity in the post-war period.137 The role of documentaries and film, such as the television mini-series Holocaust, aired in France in 1979, were profoundly important in bringing the traumatic Jewish experience of the Second World War to the forefront of public awareness.138

This chapter explores how Holocaust memory was conceptualised and articulated by anti-racists in Britain and France. On both sides of the Channel, Holocaust memory culture served in various ways as a moral and historical

132 Joan B. Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (Stanford, 2004), p. 105. 133 Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Woodstock, 2001), p. 179. 134 Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, p. 71.135 Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, p.30.136 Stefan Berger, ‘Remembering the Second World War in Western Europe, 1945-2005’, in Pakier and Stråth (eds.), A European Memory?, p. 128. 137 For the French case, see Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, (Stanford, 2004). For the British, see Todd M. Endelman, ‘The Fracturing of Anglo-Jewry (1945-2000)’, in Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Modern Britain, 1656-2000 (London, 2002). 138 Rebecca Clifford, Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance in France and Italy (Oxford, 2013), p. 63.

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anchor for anti-racist activism. In France, the development of anti-racist Holocaust memory cultures was largely a response to contemporary antisemitic and racist violence while in Britain it was mediated primarily through the lens of the anti-fascist tradition. The weight of the recent European past was frequently brought to bear upon contemporary instances of racist violence and rhetoric as a means of mobilising activists and civil society more broadly against racism and antisemitism. This chapter will make three key points. First, by exploring how Holocaust memory was invoked in Britain and France from 1980 towards the end of the decade, this chapter will show the extent to which it served as a powerful and emotive stimulus for anti-racist activism. In taking the deadliest antisemitic attack in post-war France, the rue Copernic bombing of October 1980, as the starting point (an event that did not go unnoticed by anti-racists in Britain), it will be shown just how evocative and prolonged the invocation of Holocaust memory was for activists. It will be explored how anti-racist Holocaust memory culture helped shaped anti-racist responses to moments of crisis, how its meaning was universalised and how external geopolitical events – particularly in Israel, Palestine and Lebanon – also shaped this sphere of anti-racist memory culture. Second, this chapter will explore how anti-racists articulated Holocaust memory. Anti-racist representations of the Holocaust were diverse, from activist rhetoric and literature to subversive cartoons as well as more conventional modes of remembrance such as commemoration ceremonies. Third, by exploring both the manner of Holocaust memory’s invocation and the nature of its expression by anti-racists, this chapter will finally assess the extent to which anti-racist movements contributed to the development of national Holocaust memory culture. What role did anti-racists play in raising public awareness of the Holocaust and connecting its memory to the challenges posed by contemporary racism? Could cross-Channel anti-racist interaction suggest the early development of a European Holocaust memory? The ubiquity and the efficacy of Holocaust memory within anti-racist circles on both sides of the Channel requires closer examination. By doing so, this chapter will attempt to trace the fairly malleable contours of anti-racist Holocaust memory and cast a light on the multiple intersections of racism both past and present.

From Rue Copernic to the Rue des Rosiers: Echoes of the past

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On the 3 October 1980, during the Sabbath prayer service, a bomb exploded outside the rue Copernic synagogue in Paris’ sixteenth arrondissement killing four and injuring over forty. While suspicion initially fell on neo-Nazi groups in France, blame was soon cast in the direction of pro-Palestinian terrorist networks.139 The attack provoked outrage across France and, as the most serious instance of antisemitic violence to take place since the Occupation, conjured unwelcome spectres from the recent past. Both within and outside the French Jewish community, the most obvious historical and moral point of reference the attack called to mind was the Holocaust. Only forty years before, France had been occupied by the Third Reich, the Vichy regime established and Drancy, in the suburbs of Paris, recast as a centre for the internment of Jews before deportation. As a moral reference, the rue Copernic bombing connected the antisemitism and racism of the contemporary period back to the ‘scandalous memory’140 of the 1940s. Thus, for the French public in general and anti-racists in particular, the attack was viewed through the lens of memory.141

In the bombing’s immediate aftermath there was a clear divergence between particularist memories of the Holocaust within the French Jewish community and its increasing universalization within the broader non-Jewish population. Such a divergence in attitudes reflects the pluralist nature of memory: sensitive to time, context and place.142 To be sure, this was not the first moment in which Holocaust memory took hold of French public awareness or imagination. Holocaust memory had been stirring for some time, from the Eichmann Trial in 1961 to the Six Day War of 1967 and the attendant anxieties this conflict provoked over the future of Israel.143 Following the appearance of Marcel Ophuls’ Le Chagrin et la pitié in 1971 and the publication of Robert O. Paxton’s Vichy France: Old Guard, New Order 1940-1944 in 1972, Holocaust 139 More recently, Hassan Diab, a Lebanese-Canadian was extradited from Canada to France in 2014 as the primary suspect for the 1980 bombing. After three years in a French prison, he was released and returned to Canada after judges dropped his case citing a lack of evidence. For more, see Le Monde (04/11/2016): http://www.lemonde.fr/police-justice/article/2016/11/04/le-principal-suspect-de-l-attentat-de-la-rue-copernic-reste-en-prison_5025780_1653578.html. See also, David Cochrane, ‘”Whitewash”: Hassan Diab attacks report concluding government acted properly in his extradition case’ in CBC news: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/hassan-diab-extradition-france-1.5226033 [Last accessed: 01/08/2019]. Finally, see Jeremy Shapiro and Bénédicte Suzan, ‘The French Experience of Counter-Terrorism’, in Survival, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Spring 2003), p. 67.140 Richard J. Golsan, Vichy’s Afterlife: History and Counter-history in Postwar France (Lincoln, 2000), p. 6.141 Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, p. 82.142 Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, p. 2.143 Benbassa, The Jews of France, p. 191.

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memory was casting a larger shadow over French society by the 1970s.144 This heralded, in the words of Henry Rousso, “the return of the repressed”.145 Such a return was in evidence in the wake of the rue Copernic bombing.

In the days following the attack, Le Monde carried responses from a wide range of public figures from Jacques Chirac to Gaston Defferre. Articles appeared lamenting the ‘résurgence du racisme’ and ‘le syndrome du Drancy’. Paul-Jean Francheschini, the author of the latter title, argued that the incident signalled ‘la fin d’un tabou’, heralding a shift in the nature of French Holocaust memory.146 The French President, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, drew direct parallels between the attack and the Holocaust in his statement, remarking that the bombing called to mind ‘the deportations and massacres perpetrated by Hitler’.147 Much of this was overshadowed, however, by the reaction to remarks by Prime Minister Raymond Barre who described the bombing as a “hateful attack which wanted to strike at the Jews who were in that synagogue, and which struck innocent French people who were crossing the street”, implying that those who had been targeted were neither entirely French nor entirely innocent as the non-Jewish fatalities caught up in the rue Copernic attack.148 In suggesting that French Jews were somehow ‘other’, Barre’s comments indirectly called to mind the memory of popular antisemitism in pre-war France.

The bombing was a moment in which anti-racist lines were redrawn. For the MRAP, the rue Copernic bombing was the catalyst for a reassertion of its commitment to fighting against racism in all its forms. Explicit references to antisemitism decreased as it was subsumed under the broader term of racism. On the other hand, for the LICRA, the attack on 3 October and succeeding instances of violence and vandalism reaffirmed the organisation’s commitment to combatting antisemitism as the primus inter pares alongside other manifestations of racism in contemporary France. The place of antisemitism within French anti-racist movements underwent something of a reappraisal in the early 1980s and was informed by events at home and abroad.

144 See Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard, New Order, 1940-1944 (New York, 1972).145 Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, p. 10. 146 Paul-Jean Francheschini, ‘Le syndrome de Drancy’, in Le Monde, 9 October 1980, p. 2.147 Le Monde, 10 October 1980, p. 2.148 See Pierre Birnbaum, ‘Grégoire, Dreyfus, Drancy and the Rue Copernic: Jews at the Heart of French History’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, i. Conflicts and Divisions (New York, 1996).

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The MRAP was quick to mobilise shortly after the attack, calling almost immediately for ‘un rassemblement populaire de mobilisation antiraciste’.149 The organisation’s monthly publication, Droit et Liberté, was quick to draw connections between the antisemitic attack on rue Copernic and other forms of racism in France, particularly ‘le racisme anti-arabe’.150 The event was seen as an opportunity to call attention to all manifestations of racism and xenophobia in France. Indeed, on the day of the demonstration held in solidarity with the victims of the rue Copernic attack, the official MRAP banner read ‘Halte au racisme, halte au fascisme’.151 The lack of explicit reference to antisemitism and the specifically antisemitic nature of the rue Copernic attack is striking. Antisemitism was subsumed under a more universalist articulation of racism. While the MRAP nevertheless interpreted the rue Copernic attack as a watershed moment, it was understood as symptomatic of the broader scourge of racism in France more generally. For the LICRA and its president Jean Pierre-Bloch, however, the antisemitic nature of the attack was clear. Several months after the attack, the LICRA condemned the unknown perpetrators for being driven by a ‘growing antisemitism’.152 References to the Holocaust abounded at the time of the attack and during the anniversary a year later.153 There was a clear triangular relationship between the bombing itself, its linkage with Holocaust memory and the relationship of both the event and its evocation of memory within French anti-racist circles.154

There was a wider European context to the rue Copernic bombing. While the immediate responses of the LICRA and MRAP to the attack interpreted it within the boundaries of the French nation-state, in Britain, Searchlight magazine understood the bombing and its implications in broader terms. For Maurice Ludmer, the rue Copernic bombing was confirmation of a growing European far-right threat. On 2 August 1980, Bologna railway station was the target of a far-right terrorist attack which killed eighty-five and injured hundreds more. On 26 September, neo-Nazi Gundolf Köhler died while planting 149 Jean-Louis Sagot-Duvauroux, ‘300,000 contre le racisme, contre le fascisme’, Droit et Liberté, (October 1980), p. 6. 150 Albert Lévy, ‘Ce jour là’, Droit et Liberté, (October 1980), p. 5. 151 Droit et Liberté, (October 1980), p. 7.152 ‘Qui est responsable pour de l’attentat de Copernic?’, Le Droit de Vivre, (January 1981), p. 2. 153 Annie Gilbert, ‘Un an après; la cérémonie du souvenir’, Le Droit de Vivre, (October 1981), p. 5.154 See Ethan B. Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (London, 2015): Maud Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton, 2016): Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust (Stanford, 2004).

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an explosive device at the entrance of the Munich Oktoberfest, leaving thirteen people dead.155 Searchlight had also been well-informed about a wave of antisemitic attacks across France over the course of the year and interpreted the latest as ‘the bloody climax’ of a more recent rise in antisemitism.156 Yet, Searchlight also acknowledged the historical significance of the attack in Paris as being ‘the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Nazi occupation ended in 1944’.157 While recognising the distinctly anti-Jewish nature of the rue Copernic bombing, Searchlight nevertheless implicitly criticised the response of organisations like the LICRA for what it saw as their narrow focus on antisemitism. In the following issue, Ludmer sought to remind readers that while there had been an undeniable spike in antisemitism in France, recent events revealed that ‘migrant workers, particularly North Africans, have been the victims of racist violence and harassment for some considerable time’.158 The evidence of Searchlight’s connections with the MRAP can be seen here since the latter condemned the rue Copernic bombing as a racist rather than antisemitic attack. In drawing attention to the racism faced by North Africans living and working in France, the CARF (as featured in Searchlight) sought to explain to readers the MRAP’s approach to anti-racism as making ‘no distinction between the fight against racism and that against anti-semitism’.159 This was not to deny the antisemitic nature of the bombing, but to demonstrate to an anglophone audience the MRAP’s commitment to a more universal interpretation of racism within which antisemitism was but one manifestation.

That the attack on 3 October concerned a synagogue in the France’s capital ensured that the weight of history was felt as well as the moral responsibility to challenge racism. As a measure of the significance with which the attack on rue Copernic was treated, the MRAP launched a new publication, Différences, partly in response to the event. Featuring specialist articles on French and European history and, in particular, the history of antisemitism and racism, Différences was a sophisticated intellectual organ of the MRAP. The aftermath of the bombing saw the proliferation and appropriation of the

155 For further context see, for example, Barbara Manthe, ‘On the Pathway to Violence: West German Right-Wing Terrorism in the 1970s’, in Terrorism and Political Violence, (October 2018), pp. 1-22. 156 ‘France: Concern over police involvement in Nazi groups’, Searchlight (November 1980), p. 13. 157 Ibid, p. 13. 158 Maurice Ludmer, ‘Editorial’, Searchlight (December 1980), p. 2. 159 CARF, ‘Anti-racist struggles in France’, Searchlight (December 1980), p. 17.

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Holocaust as a metaphor in French public life.160 In the LICRA journal ‘Racismes d’ici et d’ailleurs’ of 1984, the rue Copernic bombing was highlighted in its timeline of racist incidents of the twentieth century.161 This is particularly suggestive of the significance attributed to the bombing by the LICRA within a broader historical context, including the Dreyfus Affair and the Statut des Juifs of October 1940. Direct connections were drawn between the Holocaust and contemporary antisemitism, invoking the recent past as a means of drawing moral lessons for LICRA members and activists in their contemporary struggle against racism and antisemitism.162 How this was done reflected what Ethan Katz has described as a ‘complex dynamic’ of memory.163 Given the broad public outpouring of sympathy and solidarity in the wake of the rue Copernic synagogue bombing, Holocaust memory was appropriated as a ‘social metaphor’ for shared suffering and victimhood.164 As Joan B. Wolf has demonstrated, the attack was interpreted not just as an attack on Jews, but as an attack on all minority groups and France at large. Yet while Wolf examines the complex implications of the rue Copernic bombing on a national level and briefly refers to the general anti-racist response, there is little exploration of the consequences of the rue Copernic bombing on anti-racist memory cultures in particular. By exploring the various responses of the LICRA and the MRAP to the bombing one can identify what Holocaust memory came to mean in specific terms for anti-racist activists. This coming together of identity-based groups is a prime example of what Michael Rothberg has described as the ‘unexpected acts of solidarity’ that memory can encourage.165

The almost immediate recollection of the Holocaust in the wake of the rue Copernic bombing gave rise to tensions and competing memories. For many within the French Jewish community, though by no means all, the Holocaust was a sui generis historical event and its very singularity forbade its relativization. Conversely, it was the very comparability of the Holocaust and its attendant suffering with other forms of victimhood – by virtue of, for example, ethnicity or gender - that was articulated by the coalition of non-Jewish and

160 Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, p. 80. 161 ‘Quelques dates au 20e siècle’, Racismes d’ici et d’ailleurs: Cote National de Documentation Pédagogique, LICRA (1984), p. 19. 162 ‘Les nazis ont tué!’, Racismes d’ici et d’ailleurs (1984), p.34. 163 Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood, p. 300. 164 Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, p. 92. 165 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, p.221.

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anti-racist demonstrators against the rue Copernic bombing.166 For this latter group, not only was the rue Copernic bombing seen through the lens of memory, but memory was articulated through identity. For non-Jews expressing solidarity with the victims of the rue Copernic bombing, the focus appeared to be on condemning racism and xenophobia more generally with Holocaust memory serving a crucial discursive role.

This ‘complex dynamic’ of memory continued to be in evidence following the antisemitic attack on the Chez Jo Goldenberg restaurant on 9 August 1982. However, the emphasis had shifted significantly. This time, the violence was carried out by the pro-Palestinian Abu Nidal Organisation (an offshoot from Fatah). The attack claimed more lives than the rue Copernic bombing and while people took to the streets in solidarity with the dead, the gathering did not quite elicit the same outpouring of outrage and solidarity with the French Jewish community of two years before. In Droit et Liberté, the MRAP noted the difficulty in organising a mass demonstration with the victims due to the ‘very different French and international political context’.167 The MRAP responded to the attack in a similar manner to that of rue Copernic, using the event to protest against racism in all its forms rather than focusing on the specifically antisemitic nature of the attack.168 In contrast, the LICRA and Pierre-Bloch argued in no uncertain terms that the Goldenberg attack was antisemitic in nature and demanded that ‘les criminels racistes’ be brought to justice.169

Earlier that year, the journal Différences had reported on ‘the deadly actions’ of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) against Palestinians in the occupied territories comparing it to ‘colonisation’.170 During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the MRAP expressed regret that in the name of the victims of one genocide, Israeli leaders should pursue policies that might ‘lead to another people undergoing an identical drama’.171 The invasion had provoked outrage across France and prompted a sharp turn in the appropriation of Holocaust memory with prominent media outlets equating the behaviour of the 166 Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, pp. 69-70. 167 R. M., ‘Pour une paix juste aux Proche-Orient’, in Droit et Liberté (September 1982), p. 3. 168 The report on the demonstration following the rue des Rosiers attack described marchers as voicing ‘their opposition to all racism, anti-Jewish as well as anti-Arab’: ‘Contre tous les racismes et le terrorisme pour un paix juste au Proche-Orient’, Droit et Liberté (September 1982), p. 1. 169 Le Droit de Vivre (September 1982), p. 1. 170 Jean Liberman, ‘Israel: Plus D’Issue?’, in Différences (May 1982), p. 6.171 ‘Le Liban’, in Droit et Liberté (July-August 1982), p. 1.

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IDF with that of the Nazis. Indeed, it was suggested that an expression of solidarity of a similar kind in the aftermath of the Chez Goldenberg attack in light of events in the Middle East would not be possible.172 It is however striking that throughout the September 1982 issue of the journal, there is not a single mention of the term ‘antisemitism’ in relation to the rue des Rosiers attack.173 The only explicit mention of antisemitism is to be found in the text of the speech made by the president of the MRAP, François Grémy, at the Paris demonstration against the escalation in racist attacks on 24 August 1982. Yet antisemitism was invoked in order to draw attention to the racist violence visited upon non-Jews;

Like antisemitism, which led the Nazis to the climax of horror, racism against North Africans, and immigrants more generally, is intolerable.174

Even among the MRAP membership, events in Lebanon and, in particular, the Sabra and Shatila massacre of September 1982, stirred Holocaust memory and turned it on its head. One reader reproduced a copy of the letter she wrote to the Israeli ambassador for the MRAP. She reminded the reader that Israel was ‘born of persecution’ and that it would be a ‘horrible irony of fate…a monstrous triumph for Hitler if his work turned to the persecution of Palestinians and the denial of their right to exist’.175 In the following issue of Droit et Liberté, another letter warned that the racist atrocities of the Nazis had been too easily forgotten and that the consequences of this were now being seen in escalating racist violence in France.176

The speed with which antisemitism in France went from an outrageous taboo to the public conflations of Israel/Israelis with Nazis has been noted.177 For anti-racists, however, this raised the question of perpetrator/victim identification. As Alain Finkielkraut wrote in Le Juif Imaginaire (1980), ‘the world was divided into torturers and victims’.178 Yet those cast in the role of

172 ‘Editorial’, Le Matin, 11 August 1982, p. 4.173 Droit et Liberté, (July-August 1982), p.1. 174 François Grémy, ‘La trouble, la peur, la paix’, in Droit et Liberté (September 1982), p. 3. In the same speech, Grémy exhibited the universalism and internationalism of the MRAP’s anti-racism by asserting that ‘all human lives are equally precious, from Paris to Beirut’. 175 Denise Zederman, ‘Schalom’, in Droit et Liberté (September 1982), p. 2. 176 El-Iman Guy Khaled, ‘Vide moral’, in Droit et Liberté (October 1982), p. 2. 177 Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, p. 101. 178 Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, p. 9.

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torturer and victim appeared to be subject to change depending on the contemporary geopolitical context. In the context of anti-racism, the invocation of Holocaust memory was also used as a means of drawing attention to the non-Jewish victims of racism. In this way, the MRAP implicitly critiqued what they viewed as a disproportionate level of public interest and outrage towards antisemitic attacks and the comparative lack of interest towards other targets of racism. For anti-racist activists, the emergence of the ‘beur’ movement and the collision between Holocaust memory and the stirrings of colonial memory strained solidarity between anti-racist alliances between North African and Jewish groups. Geopolitics in Israel, Palestine and the Lebanese War also contributed to this strain.179 The shift from Jews (and other minority groups) as victims and racists as perpetrators in the wake of the rue Copernic bombing to Israeli Jews as perpetrators and the Lebanese and Palestinians as victims seriously problematised anti-racist Holocaust memory.

It is clear that among certain pro-immigrant and anti-racist activists there was disquiet over the amount of public and media attention to antisemitic attacks in France. Despite the solidarity expressed against antisemitism and with the French Jewish community, there was exasperation with the perceived disproportionality of the response compared to the frequency of racism and racist violence against France’s post-colonial communities.180 Sans Frontière, for instance, the anti-racist magazine written ‘by immigrants for immigrants’181 condemned the ‘odious attack’ of 3 October 1980.182 However, this condemnation was qualified by the pointed observation that this attack occurred at a time of rising violence towards the Maghrebi community, highlighting in particular the murder of a North African man in Marseille that same month which received comparatively little media coverage.183 While such attacks against North Africans in France had been a regular occurrence since the Algerian War of Independence, the dawn of the 1980s did indeed see a rise in racist violence and murders directed at second-generation North African

179 Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood, p. 302. 180 Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror and Memory (Oxford, 2006), p. 288. 181 Daniel A. Gordon, ‘From Militancy to History: Sans Frontière and Immigrant Memory at the Dawn of the 1980s’, in Chabal (ed.), France since the 1970s: History, Politics and Memory in an Age of Uncertainty (London, 2014), p. 115.182 ‘De l’urgence de l’anti-racisme’, Sans Frontière, (28 October 1980), p. 16.183 Ibid, p. 16.

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youths.184 Within the broader context of the oil crisis of the 1970s, the Iranian Revolution and the growth of the far-right and nativist movement in France in the early 1980s, there was an increase in both antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism.185 However, this was accompanied by an imbalance in the level of media coverage or popular outrage towards the racism experienced by both communities. One explanation for this is the sheer prevalence of anti-Arab violence in the post-war period.186 By contrast, antisemitic incidents on a similar scale and of a similar kind were not common thus resulting in the overwhelming public shock towards the rue Copernic bombing.

This disproportionality can also be accounted for by taking into account the considerable time lag between the development of Holocaust and colonial memories. The rue Copernic bombing contributed to the gradual universalisation of Holocaust memory in France. Indeed, Wolf has argued that in the bombing’s immediate aftermath, “the Jewish victim became the symbol for universal victimhood”.187 Holocaust memory was no longer a particularist memory within a particular group, but had been transposed to a universal status. The same could not be said for colonial memory. Despite efforts to increase awareness throughout the 1980s, post-colonial memories of the Algerian War or the Paris massacre on 17 October 1961 continued to appear strikingly niche. Such post-colonial memories were almost the exclusive preserve of first-generation North African migrants in France, just as the memory of the Holocaust had, up until 1967, been preserved within the post-war French Jewish community.

As part of the preparation for the MRAP’s annual conference in 1985, Droit et Liberté published a list of pressing issues to be considered in advance for further discussion. The primary focus of this conference was understanding the recent spike in racist violence and xenophobia and the role of the Front National’s recent electoral successes in legitimising anti-immigrant and, crucially, antisemitic violence. Throughout 1984 and early 1985, there was a notable increase in the number of references to specifically antisemitic attacks in France in Droit et Liberté. One of the themes proposed for reflection was the

184 Daniel A. Gordon, Immigrants and Intellectuals: May ’68 and the Rise of Anti-Racism in France (Pontypool, 2011), p. 203. 185 Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France, p. 128. 186 Cathie Lloyd, ‘Racist Violence and Anti-racist Reactions: A View of France’, in Tore Björgo and Rob Witte (eds.), Racist Violence in Europe (London, 1993), pp. 211-212. 187 Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, p. 94.

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question of how contemporary racism differed from past manifestations of racism.188 It posited that

les immigrés sont présentés comme responsables de toutes les difficultés (comme hier les juifs). Mais il subsiste à leur égard des séquelles de l’esprit colonial: on veut bien d’eux, mais à condition qu’ils restent ‘à leur place’...189

To a certain extent, this exemplifies what Michael Rothberg has referred to as the ‘crosscutting histories’ of France and the manner in which different pasts can resonate in the present.190 The intersectional nature of these connections – between contemporary racism, the memory of the Jewish experience of the 1930s and 1940s and of French colonial memory – suggests that there was a growing complexity in the nature of anti-racist memory, at least within the MRAP, by the mid-1980s. The rise of the far-right conjured sinister ghosts from the past and the response of the MRAP was, in part, to make an explicit appeal to History as a means of understanding the challenges of the present.

The twinning of North African and Jewish suffering in France during a rise in racist attacks and violence across the country gave way to a solidarity in victimhood and resistance.191 A string of events in the spring of 1985 –a bombing at a Jewish film festival in Paris and racist murder of North African immigrants in Menton and Marseille – alarmed anti-racists across France.192 The MRAP made clear the need for solidarity amongst anti-racists and between Jews and Muslims in France with the statement ‘Juifs à Paris, Arabes à Menton’.193 In Le Droit de Vivre, photos were shown featuring Harlem Désir of SOS-Racisme and Simone Veil with LICRA representatives at the head of the demonstration against the antisemitic attack.194 Maud Mandel has argued that the mid-1980s marked the high point of Muslim-Jewish co-operation and anti-racist solidarity,

188 ‘Thèmes de réflexion soumis à tous les adhérents: Le racisme en France aujourd’hui’, Droit et Liberté (February 1985), p. 4. 189 ‘Immigrants are presented as responsible for all difficulties (like yesterday’s Jews). But there remains the aftermath of the colonial spirit: we want them [immigrants] to remain, but on the condition that they remain in their place’: ‘Le racisme présent se distingue-t-il des formes qu’il a prises antérieurement dans l’Histoire?’, Droit et Liberté (February 1985), p. 4. 190 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, p. 176. 191 Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France, p. 133. 192 Ibid., p. 133. 193 ‘Crimes et attentats racistes: Une vaste mobilisation’, Droit et Liberté (April 1985), p. 3. 194 ‘Attentat Antisémite contre un Cinéma de Paris’, Le Droit de Vivre (April 1985), p. 3.

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though despite the excitement at the time, inter-ethnic relations soon became strained.195

By the middle of the 1980s, the LICRA began to express its unease with what it interpreted as the universalisation of Holocaust memory at the expense of recognising the specifically Jewish identity of its victims. In an editorial in Le Droit de Vivre, referencing the rue Copernic bombing six years earlier, as well as the attacks on Jews motivated by events in Lebanon, Israel and Palestine from 1982 onwards, Pierre-Bloch furiously railed against the fact that ‘[Q]uarante ans après la ‘Shoa’, des juifs sont encore tués parce qu’ils sont juifs’.196 In what could be interpreted as an expression of frustration with the limitations of invoking Holocaust memory – in that it appeared not to be halting antisemitism or preventing antisemitic violence – this was a statement of the threat posed to Jews as Jews in France. Whether this threat came from the far-right and the casual antisemitism of Le Pen, the attempt to legitimise négationnisme as a purely academic exercise in historical revisionism or from pro-Palestinian militants, it seemed as though little had changed. Some months later, the LICRA condemned the complacency with which the French state and the broader public treated the issue of antisemitism:

Pourquoi rouvrir le dossier de l’antisémitisme aujourd’hui? L’ère des pogromes est bien lointaine et révolue; la ‘Shoa’ est entrée dans les pages les plus noires de l’Histoire… Les juifs peuvent vivre aujourd’hui en France liberement et en sécurité. Nul ne se proclame antisémite. Et pourtant l’antisémitisme perdure sous de nouvelles forms… Certains diront que l'on est bien loin des persécutions de la seconde guerre mondiale et que les organisations d'extrême-droite ou néo-nazies ne sont que groupusculaires…En France, l’actualité de l’antisémitisme est fournie par l’extrême-droite, en une periode où l’une de ses composantes, le Front-National est ‘légitimé’ par son entrée a l’Assemblee nationale.197

195 Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France, pp. 125-126. 196 ‘Forty years after the Shoah, Jews are still killed for being Jews’: ‘Terrorisme = Racisme’, Le Droit de Vivre (January 1986), p. 1. 197 ‘Why re-open the case of antisemitism today? The era of pogroms is long gone; the Shoah has entered the darkest pages of History…Jews can live freely and safely in France today. No-one proclaims himself an antisemite. And yet, antisemitism continues in new forms…Some say that we are far from the persecutions of the Second World War and that there are only splinter groups of the far-right and neo-Nazis…In France, antisemitism is provided by the far-right in a period when one of its components, the Front National, is ‘legitimised’ by its entry into the National Asembly.’: G. F.,

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The assertion that antisemitism was, like any other racism, subject to subtle transformations and adaptations to suit changing social and political contexts was a clear rebuke to those who believed that antisemitism – if it still existed – resembled the antisemitism of the 1930s and 1940s.

By the 1980s, the Holocaust was one of the obvious points of historical and moral reference for anti-racist activists. Despite the debates over the particularism or universalism of such a historical memory, it nevertheless contributed to a teleological view of racism.198 This particular narrative rests on the assumption that racism, left unchecked and unchallenged, will inevitably result in the recreation of the political, cultural and historical conditions that made the Holocaust possible. History is therefore reproducible and requires le devoir de mémoire (especially of anti-racists) as the necessary prophylactic against contemporary racism. In the French case, references to the Holocaust were grounded in the peculiarly French experience of the Second World War. The ‘historicist mindset’199 of the French, in the words of one historian, is reflected by and especially concentrated in anti-racist thought and activism. Catherine Lloyd has argued convincingly for the importance of history to French anti-racist thought and that ‘there is a powerful impulse to justify present actions by past events, especially if it can be demonstrated that these enjoyed broad and influential support’.200 Memories of the recent past were crucial to contemporary understandings of the ostensible resurgence of antisemitism and the rise in anti-Muslim racism in France.

Searchlight, Holocaust memory and the French connection

The political influence and electoral successes of the far-right in British and French politics during the 1980s was uneven. During the 1970s, however, the far-right in Britain was, in the words of David Renton, ‘on a high’.201 The decade was defined by economic crisis, political instability and, for some, the increasing visibility of post-colonial communities in British towns and cities. With the passing of the Immigration Act of 1971, the criteria for those entitled to enter the country became even more restrictive and the electorate became steadily

‘Antisémitisme: les manifestations nouvelles’, Le Droit de Vivre (April-May 1986), p. 11. 198 Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe, pp. 221-222.199 Emile Chabal, ‘From the banlieue to the burkini: the many lives of French Republicanism’, in Modern and Contemporary France, Vol. 24, No. 4 (December, 2016), p. 1.200 Lloyd, Discourses of anti-racism in France, p. 59.201 Renton, When we Touched the Sky, p. 1.

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more receptive to harder political attitudes towards immigration while others turned towards more aggressive and outwardly racist manifestations of political organisation.202 Despite its negligible political success, the National Front (NF), formed in 1967, sought to whip up anti-immigration and pro-deportation sentiment with its appeals to primarily working-class communities across Britain, identifying them as the ‘victims’ of mass immigration as opposed to those who experienced racism on a regular basis. The NF maintained a steady street presence, launching verbal and physical attacks against black people and marching under the banner of St George, but struggled to make serious incursions into British electoral politics. The NF performed better at local elections, though at their peak, the NF fielded 303 candidates and secured an average of 1.5 per cent of the vote during the General Election of 1979.203 By the 1980s, following the mass-mobilisation of the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) in the late 1970s and the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979, the NF fragmented, splintering into smaller far-right outfits whose existence was largely defined by thuggery and internal squabbling. Indeed, Searchlight was reporting on the various new far-right outfits that had emerged out of the NF’s disintegration as early as January 1981.204

The contrast between the NF and the rising profile of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the electoral fortunes of the Front National (FN) south of the Channel could not have been starker. As in Britain, the 1980s was the decade in which immigration took centre stage in French political discourse.205 Indeed, under Mitterrand’s presidency in particular, immigration became an increasingly politicised issue.206 French governments of the 1970s had imposed severe restrictions on immigration and, by blaming the victim, migrants were ‘problematised’ as the reason for the rise of racism.207 With the victory of François Mitterrand in May 1981, however, the new Socialist government appeared to break with the restrictive immigration policies of its predecessors.208 This was, however, short-lived. By 1983, as economic pressure 202 Panikos Panayi, An Immigration History of Britain: Multicultural Racism since 1800 (Abingdon, 2014), p. 233.203 Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985 (Oxford, 1987), p. 291.204 ‘A Guide to the Extreme Right’, Searchlight (January 1981), p. 8.205 Mathieu, ‘The Politicisation of Immigration and Race in France: Towards a Process of Racialisation?’, in Fella and Ruzza (eds.), Anti-Racist Movements in the EU, pp. 83-85 206 Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (London, 1992), pp. 57-58. 207 MacMaster, Racism in Europe, p. 185. 208 Ludivine Bantigny, La France à l’heure du monde; De 1981 à nos jours (Paris, 2013), p. 314.

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grew on the Socialist government to abandon its path of sweeping nationalisations and wealth redistribution, so too did the government begin making concessions to those opposed to its initially pro-immigrant line. As one historian of French anti-racism has argued, 1983 ushered in ‘a new era…dominated by the anti-immigration politics of the Right and the far Right’.209 Founded in 1972, the FN’s political breakthrough came with its success in the Dreux local election in 1983 and on a national scale in France with the party’s securing of 10.95 per cent of the vote in the European elections of 1984.210 Such political success, coupled with national media attention, confirmed the FN’s position as a serious player in French political life. By 1986, the FN could boast thirty-five députés in the National Assembly.211 In spite of the imbalance in political strength and influence, the presence of the far-right in Britain and France nevertheless had (albeit different) consequences for the development of Holocaust memory. The far-right’s litany of transgressions –anti-immigration, pro-deportation, unabashed racism, nostalgia for the fascist movements and leaders of the interwar period, antisemitism and Holocaust denial – and its political heritage meant that the memory of the Holocaust was a crucial weapon in the rhetorical armoury of anti-racist activism.

Compared to the development of Holocaust memory elsewhere in Europe, Britain was something of a latecomer. The sacralisation of wartime memory in the post-war period as well as Britain’s distance from the development of the Holocaust in the late 1930s and 1940s marginalised Holocaust memory in British society. While the 1960s and 1970s were key decades in the stirring of Holocaust awareness in France, the Holocaust did not truly enter British public consciousness until the turn of the 1970s to the early 1980s.212 This is not, however, to say that silence overwhelmed and arrested the development of Holocaust memory between the late 1940s and 1970s. Recent scholarship has challenged the ‘myth of silence’ surrounding Holocaust memory in the immediate post-war decades.213 Pockets of memory existed within the Jewish community, from refugees to returning Jewish servicemen who launched the 43

209 Gordon, Immigrants and Intellectuals, p. 214. 210 Jean-Jacques Becker, Histoire politique de la France depuis 1945 (Paris, 2011), p. 208. 211 Fysh and Wolfreys, The Politics of Racism in France, pp. 51-52. 212 Andy Pearce, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, 1979-2001’, in Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, Vol.14, No. 2 (2008), p. 73.213 See in particular David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist (eds.), After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence (Abingdon, 2012).

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Group shortly after the war in response to lingering antisemitism which hearkened back to the 1930s.214 In wider British society, however, the Holocaust featured little as a topic of conversation. The historian Tony Judt recalled during his childhood in post-war England that,

even though I am Jewish and members of my own family had been killed in the death camps, I did not think it strange back then that the subject passed unmentioned. The silence seemed quite normal.215

Another historian, Tony Kushner, has questioned this ‘silence’ narrative, arguing that Holocaust memory was not so much absent as it was resisted. The Holocaust, he argues,

‘questioned the scale of British sacrifices and therefore the centrality of the war in the construction of postwar British (or more accurately English) national identity…Rather than diminishing its importance, the memory of the Second World War continued to grow and act as a barrier to considering the experiences of others’.216

Yet, this omits the fact that for post-war Britain, there were other over-riding concerns from the urgency of reconstruction, the loss of empire and international status as well as the need to find a new role and, with it, a post-imperial identity.217 In sharp contrast to the rest of Europe, British memories of the war were overwhelmingly positive - so positive, in fact, that it remains central to the way in which contemporary Britons see themselves.218 The memory of Britain’s role in the Second World War stands ‘like a rock in a sea of mediocrity’, providing respite and succour against the disappointments of the post-war years.219 As a result of this sacrosanct wartime memory, in which plucky Britain ‘stood alone’ against the enemy during its ‘finest hour’, there was little place for the awkward memory of the Holocaust. For anti-racist and anti-fascist journals like Searchlight, however, national wartime memory as well as an early representation of Holocaust memory were reconciled.

214 Endelman, The Jews of Modern Britain, 1656-2000, pp. 232-233.215 Tony Judt, ‘The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe’, in Jennifer Homans (ed.), When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2005 by Tony Judt (London, 2015), p. 132.216 Tony Kushner, ‘Remembering to Forget: Racism and Anti-Racism in Postwar Britain’, in Bryan Chayette and Laura Marcus (eds.), Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’ (Oxford, 1998), pp. 229-230.217 Pearce, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness’, in Holocaust Studies, p. 73. 218 For a recent exploration of Britain’s inability to ‘get over’ the war, see Fintan O’Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (London, 2018). 219 Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War, p. 296.

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From its official launch in 1975, Searchlight magazine made frequent literary and visual allusions to German Nazism and the Holocaust in its struggle against ‘the twin evils of racism and fascism’.220 This use of memory was usually channelled as a response to the far-right. The more Searchlight could expose the Nazi sympathies of the NF and other far-right outfits, the more they discredited their political ambitions, views and actions. Indeed, the magazine circulated images of prominent NF members and leaders wearing Nazi garb – particularly the uniform of the SA – which they had tried to suppress in order to maintain a veneer of respectability (see Fig. 1).221 Reproducing such images was also a tactic embraced by the ANL in its campaign against the far-right.222 Searchlight was not, however, immune to the overriding wartime memory of the nation. Its representations of Holocaust memory were often buried within the dominant national memory of the Second World War. Such a defiant and Manichean conception of this particular chapter of Britain’s national history meant that understandings of the Holocaust within anti-racist circles were sometimes fairly crude and unsophisticated, presenting fascism as uniquely un-British.

220 ‘Editorial’, Searchlight (September 1989), p. 2.221 Searchlight (May 1988), p. 1. 222 Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, p. 134.

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Fig. 1: John Tyndall, formerly leader of the NF before becoming the Chairman of the British National Party (BNP) in 1982, in SA-style uniform. Searchlight (May 1988).

During its early years of publication, Searchlight also carried cartoons ridiculing contemporary NF members by depicting them in Nazi uniform or with their military outfits tucked away in a cupboard.223 Other posters went even further, showing photographs from Belsen following its liberation of mass graves. No reference was made to the ethnic identities of the victims, but there is explicit reference to racist motivations for mass murder (see Fig. 2).224 However, there was a distinct lack of serious engagement with the legacy and memory of the Holocaust. It was the imagery of Nazism and the Holocaust which mattered. The very name of the Anti-Nazi League made it clear that its primary aim was to expose the NF’s Nazi worldview. While certain members of the far-right were happy to openly display their commitment to fascism, others recognised that this would hinder any electoral progress. However, for the general public, such comparisons were effective in keeping the far-right in post-war Britain (and Europe more broadly) beyond the pale of mainstream political discourse.225 Such manifestations of Holocaust memory, however unsophisticated, also bled into the popular and uncomplicated national memory of the war. The clear and deep-rooted mental binary of Nazis (bad) and Britons (good) also helped the anti-fascist and anti-racist campaigns against the contemporary Nazis. References to the 1930s and Nazism were used principally to ridicule the contemporary far-right whereas the invocation of the Holocaust and its memory was, at times, gratuitously graphic. Images of the consequences of the Holocaust with the plea, ‘Don’t give the Front a chance!’, made plain the dangers of history repeating itself. By depicting the Holocaust in such a graphic way, Searchlight’s primary aim was to shock its readers into making the connection between the NF and the racialized murder carried out by the Third Reich only a few decades earlier. Memory was therefore not simply understood as a means of coming to terms with the past (as was the painful case elsewhere in Europe) but as a galvanising force in combatting contemporary racism.

223 Searchlight (December 1977), pp. 10-11.224 Ibid, pp. 10-11. 225 Emile Chabal, ‘Europe’s Far-Right: The New Normal?’, in History Workshop (30 March 2017): http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/europes-far-right-the-new-normal/ [Last accessed 19/02/2018].

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Fig. 2: An advertisement for posters in Searchlight (December 1977). Note the absence of the term ‘Holocaust’ and reference to the ethnic identity of the victims.

In the early 1980s, Searchlight was considerably well-informed about events in France. This was primarily due to its enjoyment of links with the MRAP whose annual conferences were usually attended by at least one Searchlight representative. In May 1980, Vron Ware attended the MRAP’s conference on behalf of Searchlight and provided an account which largely summarised the keynote speech by the general secretary, Albert Lévy, on the subject of identity checks on the Métro and public spaces. It was argued that such a move would echo the use of identity cards for French Jews under Vichy.226 Lévy had coined the phrase ‘rafle au faciès’ in the 1950s as a way of drawing a direct parallel between the treatment of Algerians during the war of independence and that of Jews under the Occupation.227 That he was still using the phrase in 1980 to condemn police identity checks of North Africans in the French metropole highlights the continuing power of invoking both colonial and Holocaust memory to challenge contemporary state racism.228

226 Vron Ware, ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité…?’, Searchlight (May 1980), p. 8.227 Lloyd, Discourses of Anti-racism in France, p. 142.228 Albert Lévy, ‘Beaucoup à faire et à espérer’, Droit et Liberté (April 1980), p. 5.

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Vron Ware’s report on the annual conference also contained translated excerpts of articles from Droit et Liberté.229 The largest of these came from a February 1980 article reporting on the murders of migrant workers in France, including those of Rezhi Fehkar and Saci Ketitah, killed on the night of 6-7 January 1980 in Troyes.230 By translating and reproducing these articles from the MRAP’s monthly publication, Searchlight demonstrated its transnational engagement with and its knowledge of racism and anti-racism elsewhere. In March 1982, an unidentified representative from CARF attended the MRAP conference and was clearly impressed by the experience, reporting that ‘the MRAP has the kind of organisational basis and structure which we could learn from in building our own anti-racist movement’. The good health of French anti-racism contrasted sharply with the ongoing inability to build and sustain a national anti-racist movement in Britain following the demise of the ANL and the British left’s preoccupation with levelling their opposition to the Thatcher government.231 The report even featured an advertisement for the MRAP’s relatively new publications, Différences.232

There was a considerable imbalance in the relationship between Searchlight and the MRAP. While Searchlight reported regularly on the latest instances of racist violence in France, developments in immigration policy and anti-racist activities, this does not appear to have been reciprocal on the side of the MRAP both in terms of references to Searchlight and interest in contemporary events in Britain.233 There was also a drop in references to the MRAP after 1982, with a dearth in the number of reports referencing the MRAP or any other French anti-racist movement. This may be due, in part, to the death of Searchlight’s founder in May 1981. In the May-June edition of Droit et Liberté, there was a small notice marking his death. The obituary noted Ludmer’s enthusiastic commitment to building transnational anti-racist networks and his regular attendance at European and international conferences. It also acknowledged his status as one of the enduring leaders of

229 It is not, however, clear if it was Ware who translated these or someone else: Ware, ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité…?’, Searchlight, p. 8. 230 ‘Ils ont tué salif pour s’amuser’, Droit et Liberté (February 1980), p. 12. 231 CARF Report, ‘Shift in balance of French racism’, Searchlight (July 1982), p.17. 232 Described as ‘glossy’ and ‘popular’ which ‘presents a positive, popular educative anti-racist perspective’: CARF, ‘Shift in balance of French racism’, Searchlight, p. 17. 233 Despite articles on events in Northern Ireland and the Brixton riots, there is comparatively significantly less interest on racism and anti-racism in the United Kingdom. See Annick Monot, ‘Les enfants de Falls Road’, Différences (June 1981), p. 30: see also, ‘Brixton: Les Noirs Anglais’, Différences (May 1981), p. 16.

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the anti-racist struggle in Britain and called his death a cruel loss for all anti-racists who advocate for ‘la justice, du progress, de l’amitié entre les peuples’.234

The Holocaust memory culture exhibited by Searchlight can be understood as operating in two different dimensions. On the one hand, it featured in relation to Britain’s wartime experience. usually mediated through the British and Canadian liberation of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945. Mark Donnelly has argued that the Holocaust was marginal in British popular memory of the Second World War.235 Yet Searchlight magazine was an unusual exception to this. Searchlight’s memories of the Holocaust were largely viewed through the ‘good war’ paradigm. Holocaust memory was articulated through the prism of 1) the popular ‘good war’ narrative, in which Britain waged a national anti-fascist campaign against Nazi Germany and contributed to the liberation of subjugated European peoples and Jews in Belsen 2) and anti-racism, in which the specifically Jewish identities of victims in Belsen and other camps were recognised. On the other hand, Searchlight’s Holocaust memory also operated, at times, on a broader European scale. The March 1983 issue of Searchlight is exceptional in terms of its deeper engagement with British and European memories of the Second World War. In the editorial, Veronica Ware noted that ‘Europe has commemorated the 50th anniversary of Hitler’s becoming Chancellor’.236 Despite the revealing phrasing which suggests or even reinforces older notions of British distance from Europe, Ware nevertheless went on to stress the importance of ‘the impact of nazism’ and the memory of the Holocaust to Britain. In the same issue, Searchlight carried a high profile interview with the Holocaust survivor-turned-Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal which addressed contemporary disputes over the role of the state and civil society groups in monitoring and censoring far-right organisations across Europe. Yet, it was also an opportunity for Searchlight to confirm the centrality and importance of Holocaust memory to its mission against contemporary racism in Britain. The interview reported that Wiesenthal ‘clearly finds many parallels in the racial violence against blacks in Britain and the Jews in

234 ‘Carnet: Maurice Ludmer’, Droit et Liberté (May-June 1981), p. 16. 235 Mark Donnelly, ‘”We Should Do Something for the Fiftieth”’; Remembering Auschwitz, Belsen and the Holocaust in Britain in 1995’, Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen (eds.), Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide (Basingstoke, 2013), p. 174. 236 Veronica Ware, ‘Editorial’, Searchlight (March 1983), p. 2.

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Germany in the 30s’.237 While the interview does not carry a direct quote from Wiesenthal confirming this view, it is nevertheless clear that Searchlight sought approval of its own interpretation and articulation of Holocaust memory in relation to contemporary racism in Britain. The approval of a Holocaust survivor and activist as well-known as Wiesenthal was significant and lent weight to the didactic dimension of Searchlight’s Holocaust memory.

In the spring of 1984, two unidentified members of Searchlight’s editorial team made a ‘private pilgrimage’ of France to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy. The travel diary they kept provides a fascinating insight into the historical memory cultures of both individuals as well as that of Searchlight. Rather than limiting their visit to areas associated with the D-Day landings, the Searchlight pilgrims instead visited more poignant lieux de mémoires possessing ‘their own memories of the nazi occupation and its final days’.238 On their travels they visited Oradour-sur-Glane, the site of a massacre on 10 June 1944 in which 642 inhabitants were murdered by the Waffen-SS. After the war, the village’s ruins, situated in the Haute-Vienne, were preserved as an enduring reminder of the Nazi occupation and its brutality.239 A visit was also paid to Vercors, ‘close to… Lyon, the hunting ground of Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie’ as well as the site of the Maquis du Vercors, many of whom were killed during the intensification of fighting following the Allied landings. The physical act of remembering suffering and resistance by the Searchlight journalists in travelling to these sites of memory is demonstrative of how important memory of the Second World War and Nazism was to the magazine. It was also consciously linked to the contemporary rise in support for the Front National which, in 1984, had received eleven per cent of the vote in the European elections and ten MEPs. The Searchlight journalists also used their experience of commemoration to engage in anti-racist and anti-fascist praxis: ‘it is amazing how many fascist posters you can tear down in a morning’s motoring. But how appropriate that many are stuck on roadside dustbins’.240 At the travel journal’s conclusion, they reflected on whether Le Pen will secure votes ‘in Oradour or Vercors’. 241 The evocative role of place and memory in concentrating anti-racist minds on the necessity, indeed, ‘duty to 237 ‘Interview: Simon Wiesenthal’, Searchlight (March 1983), p. 12. 238 ‘We remember…we do not forget’, Searchlight (July 1984), p. 9.239 See Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (California, 2000).240 ‘We remember…’, Searchlight, p. 9. 241 Ibid, p. 9.

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remember’ in order to better challenge racism and fascism in the present was instructive and powerful. It also demonstrated the transnational power of anti-racist memory. Two British anti-racists physically visiting historical sites in France and remembering the atrocities carried out there while connecting the racism and fascism of an occupying German regime to the worrying electoral successes of a contemporary far-right party in France is a fascinating example of transnational memory activism. It also highlights the highly fluid nature of Holocaust and Second World War memory, cutting across spatial, historic and political lines. However, there are limits to this interpretation. It would be a mistake to suggest that this was done too self-consciously, though there was clearly a desire to convey the connection between the threat of Nazism and racism past and present. Similarly, it would not be entirely correct to suggest that this was an example of cross-Channel British and French anti-racist co-operation. At no point in the article is there any mention of the journalists meeting with representatives of French anti-racist or anti-fascist organisations. Indeed, this article could stand as a metaphor for British anti-racist attitudes to France: passing through, seeing the sites while observing from a distance the actions of their French counterparts.

Embodied anti-racist memories: Jean Pierre-Bloch and Maurice Ludmer

The lived experiences of two men at the helm of their respective anti-racist institutions on both sides of the Channel provides a unique basis from which to think about the role of Holocaust memory cultures in anti-racist activism at the end of the twentieth century. The lives of Jean Pierre-Bloch and Maurice Ludmer were shaped in profound ways by the twentieth century. Although of different generations (Pierre-Bloch was born in 1905, Ludmer in 1926), their life-long commitments to anti-racism were borne out of some of the defining moments of twentieth-century European history. As Jews, the Holocaust in particular served as a turning point in their respective anti-racist and anti-fascist trajectories.

The personal experience and memory of Maurice Ludmer proved crucial to the articulation and development of Searchlight’s Holocaust memory culture. Ludmer was born in 1926 to Jewish parents in Salford and was involved in radical politics from a young age, joining the Young Communist League (YCL)

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and later the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).242 In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, he was sent to Bergen-Belsen in 1946 with the War Graves Commission. Seeing first-hand the murderous legacy left behind by Nazism, Ludmer dedicated himself to fighting racism and fascism. The experience of visiting Belsen had a profound personal and political impact on Ludmer. In a memorial issue of Searchlight dedicated to Ludmer following his death, his encounter with the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust was identified as a life-changing moment:

Maurice’s commitment was not only that of a young Jew, horrified by what had been done to his people; for him, racism was indivisible, and what had happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany could equally well happen to West Indians and Asians in post-war Britain.243

While recognising its specifically Jewish dimension, Ludmer also saw in the Holocaust a warning of the murderous potential of racism and drew parallels between the racism experienced by Britain’s post-war and post-colonial migrant communities and the antisemitism of the 1930s. Ludmer’s conviction that what happened to Europe’s Jews in the middle of the twentieth century could happen to post-colonial minorities living in post-war Britain may have appeared hyperbolic, however, this thinking bore a remarkable similarity to that of thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire who had been quick to see the connections between the European legacy of colonialism and the Holocaust.244 One of the last research articles Ludmer produced for Searchlight before a fatal heart attack was about the rise in Holocaust denial in France and across Europe.245 Upon his death in 1981, his personal contribution to the fight against racism and fascism was lauded and described in the Socialist Worker as ‘unique and immeasurable’.246 The historical reality and legacy of the Holocaust lay at the very centre of Searchlight’s vocation.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Ludmer was deeply involved in anti-racist and anticolonial activism primarily through the trade union movement. He had been a close associate and friend of Jagmohan Joshi, the General Secretary of 242 Andy Bell, ‘A life in the struggle’, Searchlight (Winter 2019), p. 28.243 Searchlight (July 1981), p. 3.244 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, p. 40. See, in particular, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951) and Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris 1955). 245 Maurice Ludmer, ‘Institute for Rewriting History: Nazi attempt to deny the Holocaust’, Searchlight (June 1981), p. 3. 246 David Edgar, ‘Maurice Ludmer’, Socialist Worker (23 May 1981), p. 8.

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the Indian Workers Association (IWA), with whom he helped set up the Coordinating Committee against Racism (CARD) in 1961. Ludmer was, in some respects, an unusual figure in British post-war anti-racism by virtue of his personal philosophy surrounding anti-racism and anti-fascism. Ludmer rejected the idea that anti-racism and anti-fascism were mutually exclusive political movements. One of Ludmer’s legacies was his conviction that anti-fascists had an obligation to teach anti-fascism to anti-racists and that anti-racists were similarly obliged to teach anti-racism to anti-fascists.247 For Ludmer, neither could exist without the other. In the fight against racism, fascist and far-right political movements were only part of the problem. While their respective priorities may have differed, anti-racism and anti-fascism were nevertheless underpinned by a shared commitment to resist racism in all its manifestations, not solely the racism espoused by the far-right. In April 1979, at the height of the Anti-Nazi League’s mass movement against the NF, Ludmer made the case that even if the far-right in Britain were to be defeated there would nevertheless remain ‘a profound and deep-rooted problem of racism in our society’ attributing the reality of racism in Britain to ‘our own history of 350 years of colonialism’.248 Even outside of the twentieth-century experience of fascism, its national variants and continuities, racism was not a phenomenon exported to Britain from the outside via the politics of the extreme-right but something deeply rooted in the national past and the experience of colonial encounter.

The life of Jean Pierre-Bloch, who led the LICRA between 1968 and 1992, was profoundly shaped by France’s twentieth-century experience. Born in 1905 to Jewish parents – his father was from Alsace while his mother’s family came from the Algerian Jewish community – Pierre-Bloch had been involved in the LICRA – or LICA, as it was then - from its earliest days. The pogrom against Jews in Constantine in colonial Algeria was a particularly important moment in Pierre-Bloch’s anti-racist awakening.249 In 1934, he became a councillor of the Aisne department and as the Popular Front government of 1936 swept to power, Pierre-Bloch became the youngest deputé in France.250 During the Second World War, Pierre-Bloch was condemned to death by the Vichy

247 ‘Maurice Ludmer’, Searchlight (July 1981), p. 4. 248 Searchlight (April 1979). 249 For more on how the Constantine Pogrom of August 1934 influenced the LICA’s efforts to defend Algerian Jews’ rights as citizens in colonial Algeria see Sophie B. Roberts, Citizenship and Antisemitism in French Colonial Algeria, 1870-1962 (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 213-215. 250 Jean-Pierre Allali, Contre les racisme: Les Combats de la LICRA (Paris, 2002), p. 92.

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government and imprisoned several times before escaping to London. With acute experience of the Vichy regime’s persecution of Jews, Pierre-Bloch became deeply involved in the resistance to Vichy and Nazi antisemitism. Following the war, he threw himself into campaigning for the LICRA, committing to ‘la lutte contre l’oubli, contre la résurgence de l’indicible et des systems totalitaires’.251 Indeed, ‘le combattant devient militant’.252 Pierre-Bloch succeeded Bernard Lecache as president of the LICRA in 1968 and proceeded to place his personal stamp on the organisation. He was especially pro-active in forging positive ties between the Jewish and Catholic communities in France placing a particular emphasis on reconciliation.253 Pierre-Bloch played an instrumental role in organising demonstrations in support of the human rights of Jews living in Soviet Union over the course of the 1980s.

Both Pierre-Bloch and Ludmer are particularly notable for the manner in which they left a personal mark on their respective anti-racist organisations and publications. Despite their different experiences of the 1930s and 1940s, both men invested their anti-racism and respective institutions with highly personalised Holocaust memories which were shaped at once by the relation their lives bore towards the Holocaust as well as the development of post-colonial immigration in the post-war period.

Commemoration and Demonstration

Anti-racist Holocaust memory also manifested itself in more conventional ways. Commemoration ceremonies and the observance of significant anniversaries were key to the transmission of memory within an anti-racist context. Such events were opportunities for anti-racists to reaffirm their humanitarian mission against racism in the present through the memory of the recent past. Rebecca

251 Patrick Gaubert, ‘Orphelins’, Le Droit de Vivre (April 1999), p. 5. 252 Ibid., p. 5. 253 Michel Riquet and Roger Braun were Catholic priests and longstanding members of the LICRA who frequently contributed to the pages of Le Droit de Vivre. Pierre-Bloch was keen to promote mutual understanding and reconciliation between French Jewish community and the Catholic church. This took on a particular intensity in the post-war period, especially in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Despite the mutual respect and shared anti-racist values of the LICRA and its Catholic members, history continued to cast a shadow over post-war Jewish and Catholic relations during the controversy over the Carmelite Convent on the grounds of Auschwitz. For more, see Danielle Delmaire, ‘Antisémitisme des catholiques au vingtième siècle: de la revendication au refus’, in Kay Chadwick (ed.), Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 26-46.

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Clifford, whose research has explored the complex development of Holocaust commemoration in France and Italy, has noted more broadly that,

[c]ommemorative ceremonies of all types share a common feature: they unambiguously claim to be the embodiment of a direct continuity with the past. They are thus a type of performance rather than merely a form of symbolic representation, and through this performance, communities are reminded of their identities.254

Such reassertions of identity – of specific organisations, religious and ethnic groups as well as those with shared experiences of the recent past - were an important part of anti-racist activism.

The Holocaust constituted a central facet of Jewish identity in post-war Britain and France.255 While the experiences of the distinct national communities of this event were very different, there was nevertheless a shared sense of loss in the aftermath of such catastrophe. For Jewish anti-racists, the Holocaust became, as the twisted paths of memory progressed painfully and unevenly in both countries, a central point of reference in their mission against contemporary racism. The preservation and endurance of Holocaust memory within organisations like the LICRA was due in large part to the presence of survivors and ancien déportés in its membership and senior leadership. Henry Bulawko, the French-Lithuanian writer and deportee, was the master of ceremonies for the Amicale des Anciens Déportés Juifs de France (AADJF). He spearheaded the first annual Vel d’Hiv commemoration and ensured that the memory of the July 1942 roundups lived on.256 At times, he contributed to Le Droit de Vivre and his articles often contained exhortations to memory. In the ‘History’ section of the February 1985 issue, Bulawko marked the fortieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz calling for a ‘struggle against forgetting’. In his account of the ‘nightmare of Auschwitz’ he reminded the reader that ‘its memory must be preserved because a people without memory is disarmed by the challenges of history’.257 The explicit call to memory amongst those who had lived and suffered through les années noires is key to

254 Clifford, Commemorating the Holocaust, p. 12. 255 See Endelman, The Jews of Modern Britain, 1656-2000 (London, 2002); Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Woodstock, 2001); Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France (Oxford, 2014). 256 Clifford, Commemorating the Holocaust, p.46.257 Henry Bulawko, ’Auschwitz: 40 ans après, lutter contre l’oubli’, Le Droit de Vivre (February 1985), p. 5.

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understanding the nature of anti-racist Holocaust memory culture in the 1980s. Simone Veil’s testimony that her dehumanising experience at Auschwitz and, later, Bergen-Belsen had instilled in her an ‘extreme sensitivity to anything in human relations that generates humiliation and loss of human dignity’ was shared by many others and accounts in large part for the resilience and endurance of their generation’s commitment to anti-racism and humanitarianism.258 The lived experience of many prominent anti-racist activists at the time also accounts for the urgency with which they exhorted others to remember. Indeed, the fact that the past remained well within living memory and that, by the 1980s, the Holocaust had risen to a significant level of public awareness meant that such invocations carried more resonance.

In 1982, the LICRA marked a succession of anniversaries relating specifically to the Jewish experience of the Second World War in France. The February 1982 issue marked the fortieth anniversary of the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, at which proposals were made by senior members of the Nazi hierarchy for a ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish question’.259 Le Droit de Vivre situated the anniversary within a distinctly French context by noting that the first train of French Jews departed for the east on the 27 March 1942, little over two months after the meeting at Wannsee.260 The April issue of Le Droit de Vivre formally commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the ‘first racial deportations’ to the deathcamps from Drancy and Compiègne.261 With such anniversaries in mind, the September issue of Le Droit de Vivre is particularly striking for its juxtaposition of two images. The back page of most issues of Le Droit de Vivre usually depicted photographs of senior LICRA members at significant meetings, gathering and commemorative events. In this issue, the image on the top half of the page depicted the chaos and confusion of the rue des Rosiers attack on 9 August 1982 while the image beneath showed a recently held solemn commemoration of the Vel d’Hiv roundups of 16 and 17 July 1942.262 The explicit connection between contemporary antisemitic attacks and the remembrance of the no less murderous antisemitism of the recent past was made starkly clear. Within the anti-racist mind, contemporary racist

258 Simone Veil, A Life (London, 2007), p.101.259 Cesarani, Final Solution, pp. 455-459.260 ‘Il y a quarante ans…’La Solution Finale’’, Le Droit de Vivre (February 1982), p.2. 261 Le Droit de Vivre (April 1982), p. 13. 262 Le Droit de Vivre (September 1982), p. 28.

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violence could not be understood or even challenged in isolation from the racist violence of the past.

Anti-racist Holocaust memory cultures also operated on a transnational level. Between April and May 1983, anti-racists marked the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In the page d’histoire of Le Droit de Vivre, Henry Bulawko wrote an essay on the anniversary, issuing a timeline and historical overview of the uprising.263 On Sunday 17 April 1983, senior members represented the LICRA at a commemorative event organised by the Conseil Représentatif des Juifs de France (CRIF) to remember both the ‘martyrs of the deportations and the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto’.264 In Droit et Liberté, the MRAP marked the anniversary of the Warsaw uprising with an article by the Commission Antisémitisme et Néo-Nazisme which appealed for its regional committees to lobby for a street in local towns to be named rue des Combattants du Ghetto de Varsovie as ‘une rue ‘souvenir’’.265 The article also drew an explicit connection between the experience of Polish Jews in the ghetto and the ghettoised existence of black South Africans in the townships of Soweto and Sharpeville. By connecting one of the most significant events of the Holocaust to the contemporary experience of black South Africans under the apartheid regime, anti-racist Holocaust memory drew a continuum across time and space between the racism of the past and racism of the present. In making clear that segregation was by no means confined to the past, the Commission and the MRAP sought to mobilise its readers against contemporary racism. It is also notable that the MRAP’s Holocaust memory was rather more outward-looking as opposed to being confined within purely national or even European borders. However, there were limits to what the MRAP were willing to discuss. While the LICRA consistently raised awareness of the human rights abuses of dissident Jews in the Soviet Union – to the point of designating 1982 the ‘International Year of Solidarity with Soviet Jews and Dissidents’266 – this, and other domestic issues pertaining to the Soviet Union, were largely ignored by the MRAP. One of the historic faultlines between the two anti-racist movements

263 Henry Bulawko, ‘1943-1983: Quarante ans après le soulèvement du ghetto de Varsovie’, Le Droit de Vivre (April 1983), pp. 10-11.264 ‘Hommage aux martyrs de la déportations et aux héros du ghetto de Varsovie’, Le Droit de Vivre (May 1983), p. 28.265 Commission Antisémitisme et Néo-Nazisme, ‘Il y a quarante ans: Varsovie’, Droit et Liberté (March 1983), p. 4. 266 Georges Nicod, ‘1982, année internationale de solidarité en faveur des Juifs et des dissidents soviétiques’, Le Droit de Vivre (February 1982), p. 11.

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lay in the post-war breach that emerged between communists and anti-communists. The historic links between the MRAP and Parti Communiste Français (PCF) reached back to 1949.267 Despite its commitment to anti-racism, there was a clear reluctance even forty years later, to criticise the USSR transgressions against the human rights of Jews living in the Soviet Union.

The performative nature of commemorative ceremonies and their role in asserting group identity contrasts with the distinctly political and curiously multidirectional nature of anti-racist remembrance in Britain. In the December 1985 issue of Searchlight, editor Gerry Gable saluted the role of anti-racists and anti-fascists in resisting the NF’s march by the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. The editorial reminded readers that

Remembrance Day, not least for anti-fascists, is a solemn occasion, when we commemorate the ultimate sacrifice made by so many millions, in wiping the scourge of Nazism and fascism from the face of the earth during the Second World War.268

The atrocities committed by the Third Reich and its victims were addressed in a more generalised way and prioritised the memory of the British anti-fascist tradition. Despite Gable’s exhortation to ‘commemorate the ultimate sacrifice’, there is a note of defiance which reconciled the left-wing anti-fascist tradition with the post-war national narrative of Britain’s ‘finest hour’.

Such commemorations reveal the interwoven nature of anti-fascism and anti-racism in Britain. One of the most significant legacies of the Second World War in Britain was the elevation of anti-fascism within post-war British identity.269 The annual commemoration of Remembrance Day was of increasing importance within certain anti-fascist and anti-racist circles throughout the 1980s. This was especially the case as the practice of remembering national anti-fascist resistance to Nazism was seen to be undermined by the increasing attempts of far-right organizations to claim Remembrance Day for themselves.270 Remembrance Day therefore provided a means of articulating two opposing articulations of patriotism: that of anti-racism and anti-fascism,

267 Gordon, ‘Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Search for Common Ground in French Antiracist Movements since 1898’, in Renton and Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, p. 230.268 ‘Editorial’, Searchlight (December 1985), p. 2. 269 Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, p. 81. 270 See ‘Editorial’, Searchlight, Issue 126 (December 1985), p. 2., and ‘Anti-Fascist Action National Mobilization’, Searchlight, Issue 137 (November 1986), p. 7.

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which drew upon the legacy of Britain’s ‘finest hour’ in resisting Nazism and that of the NF’s vision of British wartime sacrifice rendered futile in the post-war context of national decline, imperial loss and post-war immigration to Britain.271

Towards the end of the 1980s, frustrated with the disintegration of the anti-racist movement (to be discussed further in the following chapter), British activists were far more concerned with the far-right outside of Britain.272 Seeing the growing influence of the FN, Searchlight remarked that ‘the near meteoric rise of the fascist Front National is arguably the most significant development of fascism in Europe since…1945’.273 Naturally, the anti-racist movements of France also took the rising success of the FN extremely seriously. Shocked by the electoral breakthrough of the party in the municipal elections of 1983 followed by Le Pen’s securing of eleven per cent of the vote in the 1984 elections to the European Parliament, it became clear that the renaissance of the far-right in France was a cause for serious concern.274 Le Droit de Vivre warned against what they saw as the growing ‘banalisation of the extreme-right’ in French political life while George Pau-Langevin, writing for the MRAP’s Droit et Liberté, exhorted people to listen to the voices of ‘historical memories crying caution’.275 The electoral incursions of the FN resulted in the creation of new anti-racist and anti-fascist organisations such as Article. 31 which wrote against ‘the children of Pétain’ as well as the ‘pétainiste’ rallies of the FN.276 Article. 31 was also, like Searchlight, alarmed by the growing European networks of far-right and neo-Nazi groups and took a distinctly transnational approach in its reporting on the activities of the European extreme-right. The growing electoral fortunes of Jean-Marie Le Pen, occurring against the backdrop of, by 1987, the trial of Klaus Barbie as well as ever-present fears of

271 Renton, When we Touched the Sky, p. 2.272 In October 1981, Searchlight lamented the fact that, following the meteoric success of the ANL that, ‘there is no anti-racist anti-fascist movement to speak of’. ‘Editorial’, Searchlight (October 1981), p. 2. 273 Searchlight, as quoted in ‘Jean-Marie Le Pen and the return of European Fascism: An Anti-Fascist Action Briefing’ (1987-1988).274 Pierre Brechon and Subrata Kumar Mitra, ‘The NF in France: The Emergence of an Extreme Right Protest Movement’, in Comparative Politics, Vol. 25, No. 1 (October 1992), p. 64.275 See ‘Les dangers de la banalisation de l’extrême-droite’, Le Droit de Vivre (September 1984), p. 1. See also George Pau-Langevin, ‘Editoriale’, Droit et Liberté (January 1985), pp. 1-2. 276 See Article. 31 (September 1987) and Article. 31 (May 1989).

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Faurissonian and Irving-esque négationnisme placed Holocaust memory and memory activism at the very forefront of the anti-racist mind.

It was in this context that Le Pen made his notorious comments about the gas chambers being ‘un point de détail de l’histoire’. While such ‘négationniste’ rhetoric was knowingly used in order to attract significant media attention, the comments were met with public shock.277 The LICRA responded with indignation and outrage over ‘le scandale Le Pen’.278 Jean Pierre-Bloch denounced ‘the antisemitism that…is reborn…Le Pen is an antisemite, a fascist. Let us fight to stop his rise’.279 Le Pen’s crass trivialisation of the ‘Final Solution’ and Pierre-Bloch’s assertion that antisemitism had undergone a rebirth marked a sharp dividing line in French Holocaust memory. However, Le Pen’s invocation of memories of the Holocaust revealed that the traditional dividing lines between the MRAP and the LICRA continued to run deep. The MRAP appealed to all ‘honest people to firmly reject and denounce’ Le Pen and that his racism applied to all victims, ‘Jews, Arabs, blacks, foreigners’.280 While Le Pen’s comments had specifically referenced the Holocaust, the MRAP’s response reflected its more universal approach to anti-racism by interpreting it as a not just a slur on France’s Jews but on all racialised minorities. Whether its meaning was viewed in universal or particular terms, it was nevertheless the case that by end of the decade, the resonance of Holocaust memory in anti-racist thought and practice had strengthened. Despite the sharp twists and turns of its development over the course of the 1980s, mediated as it was through events in the Middle East and closer to home, the Holocaust had become a permanent fixture of the anti-racist mind.

Conclusion

In the epilogue to Postwar, Tony Judt wrote that overshadowing Europe’s post-war efforts to confront the Holocaust was France. Not so much because France ‘behaved the worst’ but because ‘France mattered most’. As the most influential state in Western European affairs it mattered above all that France addressed its own complex experience of the Second World War.281 However, what also

277 Valérie Igounet, Histoire du négationnisme en France (Paris, 2000), p. 498. 278 ‘Le Scandale Le Pen’, Le Droit de Vivre (September-October 1987), p. 1. 279 Jean Pierre-Bloch, ‘Le Scandale Le Pen’, Le Droit de Vivre, p. 2.280 ‘Pas une signature pour Le Pen’, Droite et Liberté (October 1987), p. 4. 281 Judt, Postwar, p. 815.

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mattered – and this is clearly reflected within the diverse rhetoric and actions of anti-racists – were the extraordinarily high humanitarian, intellectual and cultural standards to which France held itself. Confronting the recent past and the utter oblivion of the Holocaust to which France contributed was, for anti-racists, a means of holding the post-war French State accountable for its failure to make good on its promises of liberté, egalité et fraternité and its seduction by racism and nationalism. This contrasted sharply with the development of British Holocaust memory. The fraught moral questions, legacies of occupation and collaboration were not an omnipresence in post-war British life as they were in France and elsewhere. And yet, Holocaust memory also mattered to British anti-racists. Indeed, at a time when Holocaust awareness was relatively muted in public awareness, anti-racists held up the recent past as a means of shocking Britons out of, at best, their complacency towards and, at worst, complicity with racism against post-colonial migrant communities.

This chapter has demonstrated how anti-racist Holocaust memory in Britain and France developed and was articulated as a result of contemporary events at home and abroad, the recurrence of antisemitic violence and through lived experience. The intensification of memories of the Holocaust during the 1980s also had implications for the terms of engagement. As Stefan Berger has argued, memories of the Second World War and, enclosed within them, the Holocaust, were overwhelmingly confined to the boundaries of the nation-state.282 It would not be until the 1990s until a more transnational approach to memories of the Holocaust began to be taken. This was also mirrored by anti-racist Holocaust memory. In France, Holocaust memory began to be understood and interrogated within a national framework. In Britain, the kind of Second World War and Holocaust memory exhibited by Searchlight largely, though not exclusively, celebrated the national anti-fascist and anti-Nazi struggle of the years between 1939 and 1945. Anti-racist Holocaust memory was, therefore, during this period largely limited to a national context. In retrospect, this was a necessary development for Holocaust memory more generally. There were limits, however, to the efficacy of Holocaust memory in anti-racist activism. While anti-racists in Britain and France sometimes drew parallels between the treatment of post-colonial communities in the 1980s with the treatment of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, this was not always a welcome comparison and indeed

282 Stefan Berger, ‘Remembering the Second World War in Western Europe, 1945-2005’, in Pakier and Strath (eds.), A European Memory?, p. 130.

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limited some anti-racists’ understanding of how racism operated in utterly different social, political and cultural contexts. This was compounded by a failure to engage with the memory of European colonialism on either side of the Channel. While some anti-racists were alert to the relevance of Britain and France’s respective colonial pasts to racism in the post-colonial present and sought to place these legacies at the very forefront of their activism, there was a notable absence of engagement with colonial memory in other anti-racist circles. What space was there for (post)colonial memory when the Holocaust and Second World War dominated the anti-racist memory landscape?

Chapter Two

Anti-racist (post)colonial memories in Britain and France, c. 1980-1991

‘Cette apparition sur le devant de la scène de la ‘question coloniale’ et de son inévitable corollaire, la question post-coloniale…n’est pas un accident, un hasard, mais bien le symptôme d’un ‘retour de refoulé’…’283

Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel and Sandrine Lemaire, La fracture coloniale (2005)

‘I think Europe is the one part of the world that hasn’t actually decolonised. The places that were colonised have gone through a process of understanding that colonial history, but Europe hasn’t taken into account its colonial past, and so it continues to repeat particular patterns, without realising that this past is no longer part of its present.’284

Gurminder K. Bhambra, interview (2017)

The previous chapter examined how anti-racists invoked and articulated Holocaust memory over the course of the 1980s. This chapter will explore how and to what extent anti-racists in Britain and France invoked the memories of colonialism in their fight against contemporary racism. Just as anti-racists were living in a post-war and post-Holocaust context, they were also operating in an increasingly post-colonial context. At the dawn of the 1980s, the end of empire

283 ‘The emergence of the “colonial question” and inevitable corollary, the ‘post-colonial’ question…is not an accident, or chance but a symptom of the ‘return of the repressed.’’: Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel and Sandrine Lemaire (eds.), La fracture coloniale: La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris, 2005), p. 10.284 Charlotte L. Riley, ‘How a history of conquest shapes the present: interview with Ghurminder K. Bhambra’, New Humanist (3 July 2017): https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5204/how-a-history-of-conquest-shapes-the-present [Last accessed: 05/10/2018].

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was by no means a distant historical event for both countries. Decolonisation was a process that had unravelled with the movements of formerly colonised peoples to the former metropoles over the course of the post-war period. The racism encountered by post-colonial communities in Britain and France reflected the continuities of colonial racism and was steeped in the historical imperial experience. As racism against North Africans in France and African Caribbean and South Asian communities in Britain intensified in the 1970s and 1980s, it was increasingly clear that it carried a distinctly post-colonial dimension.285 This chapter will examine the extent to which the memory and history of British and French colonialism (in thought and practice) infused anti-racist activism during the 1980s.

The extraordinarily rapid disintegration of the British and French empires over the course of thirty years or so after centuries of expansion and colonisation was one of the key European and global developments of the twentieth century.286 Colonial insurgency and the economic, material, military and political fatigue wrought by the pressures of the Second World War were key factors in the loss of empire. However, Britain and France’s respective ‘roads from empire’ were far from straightforward and, in comparative terms, less divergent than popularly thought.287 The widespread assumption that Britain’s retreat from empire was largely peaceful and well-managed in comparison to the ‘véritable traumatisme’ of the Algerian War of Independence exposes some of the blind-spots that remain over Britain’s imperial legacies.288 While there was no colonial war with an equivalent brutality and loss of life as that of French Algeria between 1954 and 1962, Britain nevertheless had its own record of colonial atrocities and violence was commonplace during the Malayan Emergency, the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya and civil conflict in Northern Ireland.289 Furthermore, the spectre of the Algerian War sometimes eclipses 285 Of course, immigration from these regions was by no means purely a post-war and post-colonial phenomenon. Well before the end of empire, black communities existed in Britain’s industrial and port cities. See Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984). See also, David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London, 2017). Similarly, there were sizeable Algerian communities living in France in the 1930s. See, for example, Neil MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism, 1900-1962 (Basingstoke, 1997). 286 Martin Thomas, Bob Moore and L.J. Butler, Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States, 1918-1975 (London, 2010), p. 411.287 Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France and their Roads from Empire (Oxford, 2014), p. 3. 288 Vaisse and Tombs (eds.), L’Histoire coloniale en débat en France et en Grande-Bretagne, p. 135. 289 See, for example, David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London, 2005); Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire:

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episodes of French decolonisation elsewhere, such as Indochina. The paths from empire to decolonisation were in both cases twisted, complex and perilous. For Britain and France, making the transition from the colonial to the post-colonial era highlighted significant time lags between ‘formal endings of empires and the process of reckoning with their implications and legacies’.290 In 2005, France underwent what can only be described as an explosion of colonial memory, following the controversial law of 23 February (suggesting the ‘positive role’ of French colonialism) and the eruption later that year of violence in the banlieues by ‘marginalised post-colonial youth’.291 In contrast, there continues to be a significant lack of serious public engagement with the legacy of empire in Britain despite the important activism of the Rhodes must Fall campaign and the broader decolonise movement.292

Charting Britain and France’s respective histories of decolonisation is far beyond the scope of this thesis. However, any exploration of anti-racist colonial memory in the 1980s needs to take into account the general similarities and sharp differences between Britain and France’s experiences of decolonisation. Post-war migration and the establishment of post-colonial communities in the former metropoles were key developments for the history of anti-racism in both countries. Some anti-racist organisations, like the MRAP, had been strong supporters of the anti-colonial struggle and recognised early on the continuities between colonial racism and contemporary racism against members of post-colonial communities.293 Anti-racist activism in the late twentieth century was thus infused with a (post)colonial dimension.

Racism was by no means a new phenomenon in post-war and post-colonial Britain and France. Historians have stressed that the development of racism in this period must be understood within a specifically post-colonial

Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London, 2019), p. 444. 290 Buettner, Europe after Empire, p. 5. 291 Itay Lotem, ‘Beyond Memory Wars: The Indigènes de la République’s grass-roots anti-racism between the memory of colonialism and antisemitism’ in French History, 32:4 (2018), p. 573: see also, Christina Horvath, ‘Riots or revolts? The legacy of the 2005 uprising in French banlieue narratives’, in Modern and Contemporary France, 26:2 (2018), p. 194. 292 See for instance, Brian Kwoba, Roseanne Chantiluke and Athinangamso Nkopo (eds.), Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire (London, 2018). For further scholarship see Dalia Gebrial, ‘Rhodes Must Fall: Oxford and Movements for Change’, in Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancioğlu (eds.), Decolonising the University (London, 2018).293 Yves Gastaut, ‘Générations anti-racistes en France (1960-1990)’, Cahiers de la Mediterranée, 61:1 (2000), pp. 291-292.

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context.294 Yet there has been a lack of scholarly attention paid to the explicitly post-colonial nature of anti-racism in the same period.295 Anti-racism in the 1980s and 1990s was a social and political movement deeply rooted in the post-colonial and a product of and response to the transformations engendered by Britain and France’s loss of empire. Memory served as a crucial conduit through which anti-racists could both understand and challenge racism in the post-war and post-colonial period. Stuart Hall’s contention that racism in Britain stemmed from a ‘profound historical forgetfulness’ of its imperial history served as an exhortation to anti-racists to remember.296 Similarly, in France, Benjamin Stora has written extensively on the ‘memory holes’ and repression which served to occlude and distort memories of the Algerian War of Independence.297

It is, however, striking that over the course of the 1980s, the role played by colonial memory in anti-racist activism on both sides of the Channel was largely limited. To a significant extent, this was due to the relative lack of wider introspection in both France and Britain about their respective colonial legacies. While much has been written about the French state’s official ‘forgetting’ of the Algerian war, the role of colonial memory in anti-racist activism was highly dependent upon specific individuals and the histories of anti-racist organisations – such as the MRAP – that had been active in anti-colonial politics in the 1950s and 1960s. Significant too were the memories expressed and articulated in the newspaper, Sans Frontière, which was a crucial platform upon which contemporary racism in France in the early 1980s could be analysed through the lens of memory of colonial racism in North Africa.298 While British anti-racist publications such as Race & Class revolved around the anti-racist struggle both in Britain and around the world and, therefore, was more sensitive to the presence of colonial memory, other anti-

294 See Panikos Panayi, An Immigration History of Britain: Multicultural Racism since 1800 (Harlow, 2010): Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-colonial Britain (Cambridge, 2013): Satnam Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (Basingstoke, 2014). 295 For some notable exceptions, see Kieran Connell, Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain (Oakland, 2019). See also, Ramamurthy, Black Star (London, 2013). 296 Stuart Hall, ‘Racism and Reaction, 1978’, in Sally Davison, David Featherstone, Michael Rustin and Bill Schwarz (eds.), Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and other essays – Stuart Hall (London, 2017), p. 143.297 See Benjamin Stora, La Gangrène et l’Oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris, 1991). For a reappraisal of the development of France’s colonial memory with particular focus on the Algerian War, see Benjamin Stora, ‘Quand une mémoire (de guerre) peut en cacher une autre (coloniale)’, in Blanchard, Bancel and Lemaire (eds.), La fracture colonial, pp. 59-67.298 Gordon, ‘From Militancy to History: Sans Frontière and Immigrant Memory at the Dawn of the 1980s’, in Chabal (ed.), France since the 1970s, pp. 115-128.

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racist outlets such as Searchlight had very little to say about Britain’s colonial past.

This chapter will explore the extent to which colonial memory shaped anti-racist activism. At certain moments, anti-racists presented alternative ways of seeing Britain and France’s colonial pasts as well as alternative visions of their respective post-colonial futures. Anti-racist colonial memory has been largely ignored within academic circles – though more attention has been paid to this in the case of France.299 By comparison, the historic dynamic between the end of empire and immigration is one that has received much more scholarly attention.300 Hostile responses to immigration have also been explored within this post-colonial context.301 However, the role played by colonial memory within the inherently post-colonial context of anti-racist activism in the late twentieth century has not been adequately addressed. In Alana Lentin’s Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe (2004) the role of colonial memory is only briefly acknowledged as a way for anti-racist activists to situate themselves within a historical context which acknowledges the colonial pasts of their respective countries. Lentin argues that this reveals the ‘degree to which anti-racism is historicised and contextualised by organisations themselves’.302 In taking this analysis further, this chapter will promote a deeper understanding of the role played by the history and memory of European colonialism in anti-racist thought and practice as well as the distinctly post-colonial dimension of European racism and anti-racism in the 1980s.

Historians such as Catherine Hall, Eric Hobsbawm and Stephen Howe have emphasised that the history of Britain’s empire should not be understood in isolation from Britain’s ‘domestic’ history (or rather, as something that happened overseas; ‘out there’) but as something central to ‘every aspect of life

299 See, for example, Emmanuel Debono, ‘Anti-racism: A Failed Fight or the End of an Era?’, in Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel and Dominic Thomas (eds.), Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution, trans. by Alex Pernsteiner (Indiana, 2014), p. 369: House and Macmaster, Paris 1961 (Oxford, 2006): see also Gordon, ‘From Militancy to History’, in Chabal (ed.), France since the 1970s (London, 2015).300 See David Cesarani and Mary Fulbrook (eds.), Citizenship and Migration in Europe (London, 1996): Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (London, 1982): Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Culture and the Allure of Race (London, 2000): Stuart Ward, British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, 2001): Étienne Balibar, Les frontières de la démocratie (Paris, 1992).301 See Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe (London, 2004): Panayi, An Immigration History of Britain (Abingdon, 2014): John Solomos, Race and Racism in Britain (London, 2007). 302 Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe, p. 190.

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in the imperial metropole as well as among the colonised’.303 This applies also to what is referred to as the ‘post-colonial’. It is necessary therefore to extend the chronological boundaries of what is traditionally conceived of as the end of empire. Such historical revision has also been undertaken in recent French historiography. The signing of the Évian Accords and the official end of the lengthy and traumatic war for independence in Algeria in 1962 has long been interpreted as an end-point of the French colonial empire. Yet, France’s ‘empire story’ has, in many ways, endured like Britain’s with the complex realities of post-colonial migration and its attendant ‘guerre des mémoires’.304 Assumptions regarding a clear-cut end of empire are misleading and fail to take into account the more complex reality. Furthermore, long-term consequences of the loss of empire for Britain’s sense of national identity and international status bled well into the new millennium with the vote to withdraw from the European Union in June 2016 being interpreted by many historians and commentators as the latest and arguably the most serious symptom of the country’s long post-imperial hangover.305 Late twentieth-century anti-racism has something to say, therefore, about the national struggle to come to terms with this loss and the role that a well-established history of colonial governance and entitlement played in conditioning the attitude adopted by both British society and the state towards colonial and post-colonial newcomers. The thought and practice of anti-racism is inextricable from the legacy of Britain’s colonial past and must be understood as a historical phenomenon self-consciously rooted in this longer history.

Empire and ‘Britishness’ The ushering in of the post-colonial period coincided with the ‘un-making’ of the post-war consensus.306 While the weakening of consensus preceded Margaret Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister in 1979, the broader background of

303 Stephen Howe, ‘Decolonisation and imperial aftershocks: the Thatcher Years’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge, 2012), p. 235. See also Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Cambridge, 2002). Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (London, 1998). 304 See Claude Liauzu, Colonisations, migrations, racismes: Histoires d’un Passeur de Civilisations (Paris, 2009). 305 See Gurminder K. Bhambra, ‘Locating Brexit in the Pragmatics of Race, Citizenship and Empire’, in William Outhwaite (ed.), Brexit: Sociological Responses (London, 2017), pp. 91-99: Satnam Virdee and Brendan McGeever, ‘Racism, Crisis, Brexit’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 41:10 (August 2017), pp. 1802-1819: Gary Younge, ‘Britain’s imperial fantasies have given us Brexit’, The Guardian, (3 February 2018): 306 Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain, p. 23.

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economic uncertainty, political instability and unease over questions of British identity is crucial to understanding the post-colonial dimension of a country in a state of transition.307 Britain was, as Anna Marie Smith has put it, in the throes of a ‘post-colonial identity crisis’.308 From the late 1940s, the increasing presence of non-white, post-colonial citizen-migrants challenged Britain’s understanding of itself. Until recently, Britain and British identity had been intimately associated with the project of empire-building – at home and abroad.309 From the eighteenth century onwards, British identity had been shaped in opposition to the Irish, Jews, Italians and other ‘racialized outsiders’.310 This, in turn, contributed to a distinctly racialised conception of British national identity. However, the exclusive and racialised dimensions of this identity were intensified and sharpened in the post-war and post-imperial moment.311 In the aftermath of the Second World War and as the age of empire came to an end, it was Britain’s ‘finest hour’ against Nazism which provided the latest articulation of this racialised identity, taking on as it did, in Paul Gilroy’s words, ‘the status of an ethnic myth’.312 Despite the significant roles played by servicemen and women from the Caribbean, India and South Africa, the dominant images of Britain’s wartime experience were largely white. This had the effect, implicit or otherwise, of suggesting who belonged and who did not belong to the nation. As Satnam Virdee has argued, the British – though more specifically English – nationalism that was constructed and embraced across class divides during the post-war period was underpinned by ‘a shared allegiance to whiteness’.313 The ‘racial signature’ that British/English 307 During the 1970s, Britain was undergoing multiple transitions; from the imperial to the post-imperial, industrial to post-industrial. However, Stuart Hall also argued at the time that one of the most important transitions taking place was from the post-war social democratic consensus to a ‘form of popular authoritarianism’: See Stuart Hall, ‘Racism and Reaction, 1978’ in Sally Davison, David Featherstone, Michael Rustin and Bill Schwarz (eds.), Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and other essays – Stuart Hall (London, 2017).308 Anna Marie Smith, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality: Britain, 1968-1990 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 7. 309 Catherine Hall, ‘British Cultural Identities and the Legacy of the Empire’, in David Morley and Kevin Robins (eds.), British Cultural Studies: Geography, Nationality and Identity (Oxford, 2001), p. 37. 310 See Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (Basingstoke, 2014). 311 Satnam Virdee, ‘Anti-Racism, Working Class Formation and the Significance of the Racialized Outsider’, New Left Project (December 2014): http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/anti_racism_working_class_formation_and_the_significance_of_the_racialized [Last accessed: 27/06/2018]. 312 Paul Gilroy, Post-colonial Melancholia (Chichester, 2005), p. 89.313 Satnam Virdee, ‘The Politics of Class and the Long Shadow of Racism’, New Left Project (December 2014):

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nationalism and identity carried was largely constructed against the ‘racialized outsiders’ living inside British society and was by no means a new phenomenon.314

This also contributed to post-war representations of the British population (the working-class above all) as the real victims of the peace. The idea that Britain’s empire was not somehow lost or taken, but was nobly sacrificed in order to save Europe from itself in the 1940s prevailed in the post-war period.315 Such views of the end of empire and its legacy underwent something of a revival in the popular historiography of the 2000s.316 This interpretation of the end of empire and the reality of changing demographics in post-war Britain as a result of immigration – later compared to ‘invasion’ by Enoch Powell and others hostile to immigration –rendered ordinary Britons the ‘true’ victims, condemned to become (as Powell put it), ‘strangers in their own country’.317 Those who were once ‘over there’, were now ‘over here’: the empire had truly struck back.

Such anxieties about ‘race’, identity and immigration – rising to national and political prominence during the Smethwick by-election of 1964 and crystallised by Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 speech - remain at the forefront of contemporary debates over immigration and the multicultural model. These anxieties also extend to disputed narratives of Britain’s history. Contemporary commentators such as David Goodhart have perpetuated the enduring and powerful narrative of immigration as a purely post-colonial and almost novel phenomenon and have expressed their disagreement with the idea that Britain has, historically, been a place of immigration. Goodhart dismisses this as a ‘semi-mythical account of immigration’.318 British history has instead been interpreted as one of ethnic homogeneity and immutability disrupted only in the last half-century by the consequences of the Second World War, decolonisation and globalisation. Tony Kushner has criticised this ‘mono-cultural vision of Britishness, past and present’ and uses it as the springboard for his own

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_politics_of_class_and_the_long_shadow_of_racism [Last accessed: 27/06/2018].314 Stuart Hall, ‘Interview’, in Richard English and Michael Kenny (eds.), Rethinking British Decline (London, 2000), p. 109.315 Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-colonial Britain, p. 16.316 See Ferguson, Empire (London, 2003) and Jeremy Paxman, Empire: What ruling the World did to the British (London, 2012). 317 For a transcript of Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, see J. Enoch Powell, ‘Immigration’, Freedom and Reality, John Wood (ed.), (London, 1968), p. 217. 318 David Goodhart, The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration (London, 2013), p. xxviii.

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exploration of questions of Britishness, immigration and historical memory.319 Similarly, Panikos Panayi, in his study of the history of immigration and racism in Britain since 1800 has sought to challenge the dominant view of immigration and racism as recent phenomena.320 Despite the contemporary nature of such debates within the public sphere, they are rooted in the challenges launched by anti-racist activists, intellectuals and academics in the 1970s and 1980s against such conventional views of British history. Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s longstanding aphorism, ‘we are here, because you were there’, was a clear invocation of the memory of empire and its real-life consequences on post-colonial existence.321 Anti-racists referred to history and invoked memory for the purposes of disenchantment.

If Tony Judt was correct in stating that ‘history contributes to the disenchantment of the world’ then, surely, so can memory.322 Despite the sharp distinction he drew between history and memory, it is clear that memory can be just as capable of problematizing dominant interpretations of the past as history. However, it depends on whose memory this is and what it may have to say about the past. Just as memory can provide a comforting and sanitised vision of the past, as in the case of Britain’s popular memory of the Second World War, it can also contest such interpretations. This is what anti-racists, operating within the sphere of civil society, did. History and memory were the means by which the lived experiences of post-colonial communities in Britain could be understood and analysed against a broader political and cultural context of post-imperialism, anxieties over the ‘break-up of Britain’323 and the realities of institutional and public racism.

Whether colonial memory featured within anti-racist circles depended highly upon the identities within those circles. Anti-racist intellectuals such as Stuart Hall, Beverley Bryan and Sivanandan frequently drew upon Britain’s imperial past in their analyses of the triangular relationship between racism, class and the British state. Organisations such as the CARF believed that ‘racism and nationalism are never far from the surface in British life’ and that

319 Tony Kushner, The Battle of Britishness: Migrant Journeys, 1685 to the Present (Manchester, 2012), p. 24.320 See Panayi, An Immigration History of Britain (Harlow, 2010). 321 Quoted in Virou Srilangarajah, ‘We are here because you were with us: Remembering A. Sivanandan (1923-2018)’, Ceasefire (4 February 2018): https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/us-remembering-a-sivanandan-1923-2018/ [Last accessed: 20/06/2018].322 Judt, Postwar, p. 830. 323 See Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London, 1977).

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‘this racism, is part of the British body politic as a whole – sanctioned by the state, and made popular by the media’.324 The roots of this racism, however, lay in Britain’s colonial past.

(Post)colonial anti-racist memory cultures are therefore crucial to understanding not just the motivations of anti-racists but how the historical memories of colonial racism were invoked by anti-racists to challenge racism in the post-imperial metropole. In much anti-racist literature, colonial memory or references to Britain’s imperial past were not as prevalent as references to the traditional hallmarks of national British anti-fascism: the Second World War, Nazism and the Holocaust. This was far more comfortable terrain thanks to the overwhelmingly positive national memory surrounding Britain’s role in the Second World War. To refer to Britain’s imperial legacy, however, required engaging with a less than comforting past. This should not be taken to imply that there was an all-pervading silence and forgetting over Britain’s imperial heritage. However, the lack of popular discussion, debate or official recognition of the realities of Britain’s colonial history is conspicuous. It has been suggested that Second World War and Holocaust memory took on such significance in Britain because it offered an alternative ‘screen memory’. In remembering the atrocities committed by others, Britain could turn its gaze from the suffering of those it once ruled overseas.325 Paul Gilroy, in turn, has argued that

[O]nce the history of the empire became a source of discomfort, shame, and perplexity, its complexities and ambiguities were readily set aside. Rather than work through those feelings, that unsettling history was diminished, denied, and then, if possible, actively forgotten. The resulting silence feeds an additional catastrophe: the error of imagining that post-colonial people are only unwanted alien intruders without any substantive historical, political or cultural connections to the collective life of their fellow subjects.326

By forgetting the colonial past or externalising it as something that happened outside Britain with no discernible effect on Britain’s domestic development, the post-colonial presence inside British society was decoupled from this past. Their 324 ‘Comment’, CARF (April/May 1991), p. 2. 325 See Dan Stone, ‘Britannia Waives the Rules: British Imperialism and Holocaust Memory’, in Dan Stone (ed.), History, Memory and Mass Atrocity: Essays on the Holocaust and Genocide (Middlesex, 2006).326 Paul Gilroy, Post-colonial Melancholia (Chichester, 2005), p. 90.

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visible presence was little more than an historical anomaly. And yet, these ‘historical, political or cultural connections’ were bound up in an intimate, shared imperial/colonial past between the formerly colonised and former colonisers. The formation of grassroots and autonomous anti-racist organisations by communities shaped directly by the colonial or post-colonial experience, such as the Black People’s Alliance and Anti-Racist Alliance (founded in 1968 and 1991 respectively), were important moments in the development of post-colonial anti-racism. The very existence of such groups as platforms for mobilisation against racism – rooted deeply in Britain’s imperial history of encountering ‘the Other’ overseas and now encountering ‘the Other’ on the streets of Bradford or London327 – and solidarity were expressions of this post-colonial moment. Anti-racists offered an alternative way of understanding racism; as a powerful (and subtle) historical and cultural force in shaping popular conceptions of British identity.328

France: La Marche and the colonial memories of the MRAP and LICRA For France, war in Indochina ending in the humiliating defeat of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, followed by eight years of war in Algeria, meant that the end of the French colonial empire was a ghastly and protracted affair. Despite a long history of mass migration with the settlement of Italians and others over the course of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, the arrival of migrant workers in the 1950s and 1960s established North Africans and especially Algerians as a major presence in the national population.329 By the 1970s, with the tightening on immigration policy in France and across Western Europe in the wake of the oil crisis and its subsequent economic pressures, immigration had become an increasingly politicised issue. The post-colonial presence of North Africans in France came to reveal, in the words of one scholar, ‘profound French anxieties about the strength and vitality of the nation’.330 Diverse post-colonial communities, such as Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians among others, became the symbolic representation of French uncertainty and an

327 See Linda Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An Argument’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 31, No. 4 (October 1992). 328 Gilroy, Post-colonial Melancholia, p. 12. 329 See Gérard Noiriel,Le creuset francais: histoire de l’immigration, XIXe-XXe siècle (Paris, 1988); see also, Émile Temime, France, terre d’immigration (Paris, 1999).330 Richard L. Derderian, North Africans in Contemporary France: Becoming Visible (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 1.

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apparent crisis in national identity.331 Yet this ‘crisis’ had begun earlier. Only two decades separated French anti-racists in the 1980s from the traumatic experience of the Algerian War of Independence and the broader dismantling of the French colonial empire. The rush to forget what had happened in French Algeria and the scarcity of explicit reference in French public life to ‘la sale guerre’ after 1962 signalled the extent to which the rupture had torn through the integrity of French national identity.332 By the early 1980s, however, there was a moment in which colonial memory resurfaced and manifested in the streets of the French capital to stake its claim to recognition.

The Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme was an important moment in the development of a popular expression of anti-racist colonial memory cultures. Racist violence against North Africans had been reaching epidemic proportions, intensifying in particular between 1982 and 1983.333 In his recollection of the months preceding the march, Bouzid Kara recalled that 'l’été 1983 fut intenable’.334 Sociologist and activist, Saïd Bouamama (who, like Kara, had also participated in the march) went further with ‘l’été sanglant de 83’.335 The anxiety surrounding the rise in racist attacks and the sense that some political and cultural expression of identity and, crucially, resistance had to be made was palpable. Setting off from Marseille in October 1983 and picking up fellow marchers along the way, the Marche des Beurs (as it became more commonly known), arrived in Paris with some 100,000 demonstrators to greet them. In his memoir of the march and its legacy, Dix ans de marche des Beurs (1994), Bouamama recalled the heady and intoxicating atmosphere: ‘[N]ous étions tous persuadés alors qu’un coup fatal venait d’être porté au racisme et à l’exclusion’.336 Significantly, leaders of the march were invited to the Elysée Palace to meet President Mitterrand and discuss their concerns and demands – some of the most important of which included introducing stronger punishment for the perpetrators of racially motivated crimes as well as the introduction of

331 Thomas Deltombe and Mathieu Rigouste, ‘The Enemy Within: The Construction of the “Arab” in the Media’, in Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Dominic Thomas (eds.), The Colonial Legacy in France: Fracture, Rupture and Apartheid, trans. Aleis Pernsteiner, (Bloomington, 2017), p. 116. 332 Jo McCormack, Collective Memory: France and the Algerian War (1954-1962) (Plymouth, 2007), p. 2. 333 Derderian, North Africans in Contemporary France, p. 28. 334 ‘The summer of 1983 was unbearable’: Bouzid Kara, La Marche: Les carnets d’un “marcheur” (Sindbad, 1984), p. 27. 335 Saïd Bouamama, Dix ans de marche des Beurs: Chronique d’un mouvement avorté (Paris, 1994), p. 54.336 Ibid., p. 17.

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ten-year residency cards for migrant workers and their families.337 As an expression of political and cultural identity, the Marche pour l’égalité was an important moment for North Africa n visibility in France.338 The youthfulness of its participants was also a significant factor. These were the children and, in some cases, the grand-children of first-generation North African migrants in France and the majority had had been born in France. The march was a moment in which the descendants of Algerians, Tunisians and Moroccans laid claim to their rights as French citizens while asserting their own cultural (beur) identity.339

Bouamama’s recollections of the march are of particular interest to the historian of anti-racist memory cultures. Echoing the dilemma in which anti-racism in Britain found itself in the 1980s following the mass movements of the late 1970s, Bouamama was, a decade after the Marche pour l’égalité, bitterly disappointed by the movement’s failure to sustain momentum. Moreover, he was highly critical of the youthful naivety of the marchers and their ostensible failure to acknowledge their indebtedness to the struggles for justice waged by previous generations. The Marche pour l’égalité was the continuation, in Bouamama’s view, of a historical current of activism ranging from the anticolonialism of the Étoile Nord-Africaine of the 1920s and 30s, through to the Algerian War of Independence and to the activism of migrant workers in France during the 1970s.340 In this regard, Bouamama invocation of the memory cultures of anticolonial and anti-racist resistance was strikingly similar to that of thinkers such as Stuart Hall and Sivanandan in Britain.

While the march was led by young activists and Christian Delorme - a priest with a long-standing commitment to social justice and, in particular, the rights of migrant workers – the Marche pour l’égalité was also supported by other anti-racist organisations. Despite these expressions of support, there were nevertheless tensions between the established anti-racist organisations and the new grassroots movements.341 The very different social and historical backgrounds from which organisations like the MRAP and the LICRA had emerged and those of the second-generation North African activists resulted in

337 Gordon, Immigrants and Intellectuals, p. 217.338 See Derderian, North Africans in Contemporary France (Basingstoke, 2004).339 Emile Chabal, A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 188-190.340 Bouamama, Dix ans de marche des Beurs, p. 24.341 Lloyd, Discourses of Antiracism in France, p. 196.

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some mutual distrust and suspicion of the others’ aims. The post-colonial critiques so effectively delivered by the Marche pour l’égalité and succeeding beur activism such as Convergences ’84 placed pressure on traditional anti-racist bodies to adapt their approach to countering contemporary racism.342 This was reflected, in part, by the LICRA and MRAP’s adoption of the language of le droit à la difference. While the concept of différence within anti-racist discourse was by no means a novel phenomenon - Albert Memmi’s promotion of ‘le droit d’être différent’ had been especially influential on the MRAP during the 1950s and 1960s – its incorporation into the discourse of traditional anti-racist organisations marked an attitudinal shift towards the relationship between anti-racist universalism and particularisms.343 The MRAP heralded the 1983 march as a triumph and criticised the media for its negative portrayal of the beur marchers.344 The LICRA expressed its solidarity with the marchers and stressed the importance of defending ‘le droit à la différence dans le respect de la dignité humaine. Pour exiger une répression impitoyable des crimes et des délits racistes’.345 Revealingly, the LICRA editorial also went on to assert that their solidarity with the march reflected its commitment to fighting ‘toutes les formes de racisme sous quelque masque qu’il se camouflet, quelqu’en soit les auteurs ou les instigateurs’.346 This was a clear rebuke to critics – presumably from within the MRAP – about the LICRA’s tendency to focus primarily on the fight against antisemitism. Yet, the political and cultural significance of the ‘Marche des Beurs’ ensured that even the more traditional anti-racist movements came out in support of youths calling for the recognition of difference in the ‘one and indivisible’ French Republic.

The MRAP was particularly proud of its record during the age of decolonisation. In 1984, marking the MRAP’s thirty-fifth anniversary, an article in Droit et Liberté recounted the MRAP’s origins in the Holocaust (‘le traumatisme du génocide’) and its ‘action courageuse et tenace’ during the wars in Indochina and Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s.347 It made the clear

342 Ibid., p. 198. 343 Lloyd, Discourses of Antiracism in France, p. 151.344 See ‘La marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme’, Différences (January 1984), p. 5. 345 ‘…the right to difference and respect for human dignity. To demand a ruthless repression of racist crimes and misdemeanours’: ‘Marche pour l’egalite et contre le racisme’, Le Droit de Vivre (December 1983), p. 1. 346 ‘…all forms of racism under any camouflage, whoever its authors or instigators’: Le Droit de Vivre (December 1983), p. 1.347 ‘Anniversaire: Comment fêter les trente cinq ans du MRAP’, Droit et Liberté (May-June 1984), p. 1.

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connection between France’s Vichy and colonial past and the reality of its post-colonial present, from the colonial wars of the mid-century and the migratory flows of North Africans and other ex-colonial communities into France as a result of colonial war and decolonisation. The MRAP’s anti-racism was rooted in its ‘prise de conscience’ and having charted France’s particular experience of the occupation, Nazi racism, antisemitism and colonial racism, understood how ‘tous les racismes’ related to each other.348

The LICRA, however, had little to say about France’s colonial heritage and as far as the organisation possessed a coherent colonial memory culture informing its anti-racist discourse, it was largely non-existent. This can be explained to a significant extent by reference to the LICRA’s preoccupation with countering antisemitism and the strength of its Holocaust memory culture. However, this was not to the total exclusion of reporting on other racisms in France. In Le Droit de Vivre, the LICRA reported on contemporary racism against North Africans and was well-informed on the social and economic realities of life for North Africans and other minorities living in France. Indeed, its name change in 1979, from the Ligue internationale contre l’antisémitisme (LICA) to the Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme was a testament to Pierre-Bloch’s personal desire to see the LICRA broaden the horizons of its anti-racist outlook.349 Yet despite this name change, it is clear that antisemitism remained, for the LICRA, the primus inter pares of racism, reflecting the particular personal and institutional history of the organisation. In December 1981, the LICRA expressed its solidarity

avec toutes les victims de toutes ces formes de racisme, avec les Français juifs ou musulmans, les Français des DOM-TOM, avec les travailleurs noirs et maghrébins, avec les Gitans, français ou étrangers, avec les immigrés de toutes nationalités.350

While laying claim to an anti-racist universalism, it nevertheless remained the case that the LICRA’s relationship to French colonial history and memory was

348 ‘Anniversaire’, Droit et Liberte, p. 1. See also Lloyd, Discourses of Antiracism in France (Aldershot, 1998). 349 Gastaut, ‘Générations anti-raciste en France (1960-1990)’, Cahiers de la Mediterranée p. 301. 350 ‘[W]ith all victims of all forms of racism, with French Jews or Muslims, the French of the DOM-TOM, with black and Maghrebi workers, with Roma, French or foreign, with immigrants of all nationalities’: ‘Combat et solidarité’, Le Droit de Vivre (December 1981), p. 13.

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complex even when it centred on one of the most notorious instances of racist violence during the colonial period. When the LICRA reported on racist attacks against North Africans in France, there was rarely any mention of France’s colonial history let alone any invocation of colonial memory. Indeed, the closest the LICRA came to addressing France’s colonial legacy was in a short article marking the thirtieth anniversary of the events of 17 October 1961. On this date, a peaceful demonstration by Algerians in Paris against a curfew imposed by the Police Nationale during the latter stages of the Algerian War of Independence descended into what two scholars have described as ‘the bloodiest act of state repression of street protest in Western Europe in modern history’.351

The LICRA’s official statement marking the anniversary of 17 October is striking for what it said and did not say.352 It compared the events of the 17 October 1961 to Kristallnacht in November 1938 and the Vel d’Hiv roundups of July 1942. Such comparisons were not new and anti-racist organisations, such as the MRAP, had drawn similar parallels between the treatment of Jews under Vichy and that of Algerians in France before and during the Algerian War of Independence.353 At the time of the Algerian War, the LICRA’s reactions to anti-Algerian repression in the 1950s and 1960s had been, as one characterization has put it, ‘timid’.354 Several decades on, the timidity of the LICRA’s approach towards remembering historical moments of colonial atrocity was still in evidence though it exhibited a recognition of the powerful intersections between the memory of police raids of Algerian households and the deaths of demonstrators in Paris at the hands of state authorities with the memory of the Holocaust and Occupation in the 1940s. The LICRA called upon its members to remember the ‘barbaric acts’ of the 17 October and to ‘ask forgiveness’ of the victims and their families ‘for the honour of humanity and…France. Let us remember’.355

However, not once did this statement refer to the Algerian War of Independence or France’s colonial legacy. In comparison to the LICRA’s alertness to antisemitism and the frequent connection of antisemitic incidents,

351 House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, p. 1. 352 Mémoire du 17 octobre 1961’, Le Droit de Vivre (December 1991), p. 23.353 See House, ‘Memory and the Creation of Solidarity during the Decolonization of Algeria’, in Yale French Studies, No. 118/119 (2010), pp. 20-21. 354 House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, p. 195. 355 ‘Mémoire du 17 octobre 1961’, Le Droit de Vivre (December 1991), p. 23.

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statements or violence to the Holocaust, the Vichy regime and the Second World War more broadly, the lack of reference to the colonial origins and context of racism in France is conspicuous. The LICRA’s remarkably reductive representation of 17 October 1961, stripped of the surrounding historical context, did not tell the full story. Despite the distinctly moral tone of the LICRA’s exhortations to remember the 17 October for the sake of humanity and France’s ‘honour’, there was a failure to connect this event with the historical and contemporary reality of colonial racism and violence. The fact that during the 1930s, the LICA had been a defender of France’s ‘mission civilisatrice’ and committed to the republican and universal ideals of the French colonial empire may account for the LICRA’s inability over half a century later to confront France’s colonial past.356 Holocaust memory served as the LICRA’s default point of moral reference and was used to mobilise anti-racist actors in a powerful and effective way. The history and memory of French or, more broadly, European colonialism, judging by its relative absence in the pages of Le Droit de Vivre or in the rhetoric of leading members of the LICRA, did not hold the same degree of significance in their commitment to antisemitism. The LICRA’s approach to France’s colonial legacies was complex. As chapter four will explore in greater detail, the Carpentras Affair of 1990 – motivated as it was by murderous antisemitism and imbued by anti-racists with the memory of the Holocaust - prompted Pierre-Bloch to make a powerful call for solidarity with North Africans in France (‘the primary victims’ of racism). This would reveal, on the one hand, a certain ambivalence towards France’s colonial legacy and, on the other, an increasing flexibility of the LICRA’s Holocaust memory to accommodate colonial memories.357

In contrast, the MRAP had been quick to draw parallels between the experiences of Algerians living in Paris during the war of independence and of Jews in the 1940s. In 1991, the MRAP covered the thirtieth anniversary of the 17 October 1961 in far greater detail. In Différences, Chérifa Benabdessadok explored how Charles Palant – general secretary of the MRAP between 1950 and 1971 as well as a former deportee and survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald - had responded to the events of 17 October by likening them to the ratonnades of the 1940s – ‘the total form of the pogrom’.358 Palant had not

356 House, ‘Memory and the Creation of Solidarity during the Decolonization of Algeria’, in Yale French Studies, No. 118/119 (2010), p. 17. 357 Pierre-Bloch, ‘Réactions de la LICRA’, Le Droit de Vivre (May/June/July 1990), p. 2.358 Charles Palant, ‘Pour l’union’, Droit et Liberté (15 December 1961), p. 6.

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shied away from drawing direct parallels between the actions of collaborators and colonisers. While the French government was quick to bury the story of the 17 October, Palant was adamant that it was an event ‘every anti-racist must be concerned about’.359 Thirty years on, while Benabdessadok remarked that Palant’s use of the word ‘pogrom’ to describe the 17 October may well appear ‘too strong, even shocking’ to some, it captured the essence of an event for too long ‘forgotten by collective memory’.360

For the LICRA and MRAP alike, even though the latter paid closer attention to the particularities of racism towards North Africans and other post-colonial minority communities living in France, the memories of the Holocaust, Occupation and interwar antisemitism served as powerful boundaries within which there was limited space for colonial memory. This space grew in different ways over the course of the 1990s. While the decade later saw the LICRA incorporate colonial memory into their anti-racist ethics, the Holocaust nevertheless remained ‘the black hole’, to borrow a term from Pierre Birnbaum, around which the organisation’s historical memory revolved.361 In 1995, the LICRA’s leadership called for deeper engagement with France’s Muslim communities, echoing the proactive role the LICRA played in Jewish and Catholic exchanges of the 1980s.362

Anti-racist intellectuals and colonial memory cultures in Britain and France

The role of intellectuals in making explicit the connections between Britain’s colonial past and contemporary racism – both within schools and in wider society - is essential to any reflection on anti-racist colonial memory. While the British Empire no longer formally existed by the 1980s, figures such as Stuart Hall and Sivanandan saw clear continuities between the institutions and practices inherent to the empire-building of previous centuries and the existence of systemic and institutional racism in contemporary Britain. However, the presence, role and influence of intellectuals in anti-racist activism

359 Palant, ‘Pour l’union’, Droit et Liberté, p. 6.360 Chérifa Benabdessadok, ‘Le MRAP et le 17 octobre 1961: Un pogrom à Paris?’, Différences (October 1991), p. 4.361 Pierre Birnbaum, ‘Grégoire, Dreyfus, Drancy and the Rue Copernic: Jews at the Hear of French History’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory; Vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions (New York, 1996), pp. 421-423.362 Jean Pierre-Bloch, ‘Amorcer un tournant historique’, Le Droit de Vivre (November/December 1994-January 1995), p. 3.

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was arguably more visible and celebrated in France. The enduring influence of mid-twentieth-century anti-colonial and anti-racist intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Aimé Césaire and the later contributions of thinkers such as Pierre-André Taguieff and Alain Finkielkraut to the publications of the MRAP and Jean Yves-Camus to the LICRA’s Le Droit de Vivre were vital to sustaining an internal dynamic of self-interrogation and serious reflection on questions of racism and anti-racism.363 Despite the relative youth of Taguieff, Finkielkraut and Yves-Camus in the early 1980s, they were nevertheless introduced by these publications as intellectuels and philosophes. Their ideas were taken seriously by anti-racist organisations which sought legitimacy not just from their own histories and commitments to fighting racism but also from the debates of serious thinkers which shaped the intellectual and philosophical contours of their own approach to anti-racism.364

One of the most engaged anti-racist thinkers in French intellectual life during the 1980s was the philosopher Étienne Balibar. Balibar explored racism, anti-racism and debates surrounding immigration in France within a broader sociological and historical context. He placed a particular emphasis on the continuities between France’s colonial past and its post-colonial present, relating colonial memories to contemporary questions about racism and anti-racism in the early 1980s. Indeed, it was during this period that Balibar acquired a certain notoriety as a result of his expulsion from the PCF (of which he had been a member since 1961) following an essay he wrote sharply criticising the party’s immigration policy.365 His writings thereafter examined how contemporary notions of French citizenship and belonging were shaped by the French colonial experience. In the essay, ‘Sujets ou citoyens? (Pour l’égalité)’, published in 1984 by Les Temps Modernes, Balibar reflected on the language of the politics of immigration and French citizenship.366 He stressed that France’s colonial history could not be seen as somehow exterior to the national histoire hexagonale and argued that the vocabulary of ‘proximité culturelle’, used in relation to contemporary immigration, was ‘un pur produit 363 See Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, ‘The Rise of the Francophone Post-colonial Intellectual: The Emergence of a Tradition’, in Modern and Contemporary France, 17:2 (April 2009), pp. 163-175. 364 See ‘En debat: Le Racisme est-il naturel?’, Différences (October 1983), pp. 36-37; Jean Yves-Camus, ‘L’antisémitisme de l’extrême droite en France’, Le Droit de Vivre (April-May 1986), pp. 13-14. 365 Étienne Balibar, ‘De Charonne à Vitry’, in Étienne Balibar (ed.), Les frontières de la démocratie (Paris, 1992), pp. 19-34. 366 Étienne Balibar, ‘Sujets ou citoyens? (Pour l’égalité), in Balibar (ed.), Les frontières de la démocratie, p. 58.

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de la colonisation’.367 Balibar identified the republican ideal of assimilation – which continued to be championed well into the post-colonial period – as a ‘véritable symbole de l’impérialisme français’, highlighting the historical, social and cultural continuities of the colonial past into the post-colonial present.368 In a manner similar to anti-racist intellectuals in Britain, Balibar consistently drove home the fact that racism in contemporary French society was not a novel phenomenon nor the fault of those who were from or were descendants of those from formerly colonised societies. Rather, racism had deep roots in ‘les traditions héritées du colonialisme’.369

Anti-racist intellectuals in Britain served a similar function, though in a more understated way. As Stefan Collini has persuasively argued, there is a tendency in Britain to blush at the thought of being described or describing oneself as an intellectual. This does not mean, however, that Britain does not ‘do’ intellectuals. Indeed, intellectuals have been far from ‘absent’ or ‘alien’ to British society and culture over the twentieth century.370 The muted though palpable influence of anti-colonial intellectuals in British anti-racism is also due to the fact that they were not affiliated to anti-racist groups or organisations as strongly as intellectual supporters of different movements in France. While French intellectuals were more willing and, indeed, were expected to involve themselves in activism by signing petitions, going on marches and generally making themselves visible in their support for the anti-racist cause, the same level of importance was not attributed to their counterparts north of the Channel.

Upon the death of Sivanandan in early January 2018, some tributes made references to the lack of wider public recognition (even within black and minority ethnic communities) of his contribution to British political and cultural life, despite the fact that he furnished British anti-racism with some of its defining vocabulary. The journalist Gary Younge noted how Sivanandan’s aphorism that ‘we are here because you were there’ had finally established itself in mainstream post-colonial and anti-racist thought upon its use by the Labour MP David Lammy in a speech during the Westminster Hall debate over the Windrush scandal on 30 April 2018.371 This, Younge stated, was a mark of just how far Sivanandan’s ideas about race, racism and anti-racism ‘travelled in 367 Ibid., p. 58.368 Ibid., p. 59.369 Étienne Balibar, ‘La société métisée’, in Balibar (ed.), Les frontières de la démocratie, p. 75.370 Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006), pp. 2-3.

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our politics, how deeply embedded his thinking was that it traversed a tradition and a couple of generations and ended up in Parliament to help us frame a crisis’.372 In making reference to the longevity of such a powerful saying and the time it had taken – several decades - for it to be anchored firmly in popular British post-colonial rhetoric, Younge hinted at the lack of recognition Sivanandan had received outside anti-racist circles in the 1970s and 1980s for his role in shaping their thought processes and activist tropes.

The intellectual value of figures like Sivanandan and Hall to the anti-racist movement in Britain resided fundamentally in the way that they framed discussions about ‘race’, racism and anti-racism in the broader historical context of the colonial past and post-colonial present. On 12 March 1983, Sivanandan delivered a speech to the Greater London Council (GLC) Ethnic Minorities Unit consultation. In his analysis of the ‘changing nature of racism’, Sivanandan drew upon anti-racist colonial memory cultures in order to highlight the continuities between the racism of the present and that of the past which was ‘carried over from the colonial period’.373 Furthermore, he situated the anti-racist struggles of the 1980s – particularly that of self-organising black communities – in the historical and political traditions of anti-slavery and anti-colonialism, arguing that these were ‘a part of our history – a beautiful massive texture that in turn strengthened the struggles here and fed back to the struggles there’.374 Here, Sivanandan articulated an anti-racist temporality in which the spatial and temporal dynamics between ‘the struggles here and…the struggles there’ fed into the anti-racist struggles of the 1980s.

These continuities were similarly addressed in The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (1985) by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe who sought to move Black women’s experiences to the centre stage of the anti-racist and feminist struggle. Crucially, this book situated the lived experiences of black women in Britain within a longer historical and memorial context. Demonstrating how colonial racism bled into the post-colonial present, the authors wrote that during post-war migration, ‘Black

371 David Lammy, ‘Speech on the Windrush Crisis’, 30 April 2018: https://www.davidlammy.co.uk/single-post/2018/05/29/Speeches-on-the-Windrush-crisis-in-Parliament [Last accessed: 08/01/2020].372 Gary Younge, ‘We say his name: Memorial Tributes to A. Sivanandan’, Race & Class, 60:2 (October 2018), p. 96.373 Ambalavaner Sivanandan, ‘Challenging Racism: Strategies for the 1980s’, in A. Sivanandan (ed.), Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism (London, 1990), p. 64. 374 Ibid., p. 66.

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people began to enter Britain as immigrants, we came to a country we had already helped to build’.375 The Heart of the Race also demonstrated how Black women have, historically, challenged the ‘triple state of bondage’ of race, class and sex.376 The roots of this condition lay in ‘Britain’s racist past’ and the inability of British society to address both its colonial legacies and the very real implications it had in the contemporary period.377 From slavery to colonial exploitation, negative stereotypes and assumptions about people (particularly women) of colour had been deeply embedded in the British cultural and psychological landscape. Bryan, Dadzie and Scafe cast a spotlight on the experiences of Black women in the workplace, the public square and within anti-racist circles which were, at the time, largely dominated by men. Giving voice to the lived experiences of women of colour was a particularly important and necessary corrective in the development of anti-racist post-colonial memory cultures. Furthermore, it reflected the sheer heterogeneity of anti-racist memory cultures, accommodating as they did not only the general historical memory of British and European colonialism but of the shared and divergent experiences of men and women of colour.

Stuart Hall’s repeated references to the legacies of colonialism and the enduring influence of Britain’s imperial past on its post-colonial present are often understood in the context of his cultural and theoretical thought.378 However, his insistence that the past continued to bleed into the future should also be historicised and understood as an expression of anti-racist (and anti-colonial) memory culture. If we are to return to Pascal Blanchard and Nicolas Bancel’s conception of memory as a crucial and complex dynamic in the shaping of social relationships between minority communities, society at large and - on a subjective level – themselves, then perhaps a deeper understanding of Hall’s approach can be appreciated.379 Memory, on a personal and broader national level, played a crucial role in his anti-racist and intellectual activism. Like Sivanandan, Hall sought to dismantle the binary way of thinking about empire as something that happened ‘over there’, set apart from the unravelling of Britain’s domestic history ‘over here’. As far as he was concerned, neither could

375 Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (1985), p. 7.376 Ibid., p. 2.377 Ibid., p. 9. 378 See, for example, Helen Davis, Understanding Stuart Hall (London, 2004). 379 Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard, ‘The Meanders of Colonial Memory’, in Blanchard, Lemaire, Bancel, Thomas and Pernsteiner (eds.), Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution, trans. Pernsteiner (Bloomington, 2014), p. 408.

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be separated from the other. Hall railed against the intellectual and moral laziness of viewing racism in Britain as a peculiarly post-war phenomenon, decoupled from Britain’s imperial past.380 As he memorably put it, the legacy of empire ‘is in the sugar you stir; it is in the sinews of the famous British ‘sweet tooth’; it is in the tea-leaves at the bottom of the next ‘British’ cuppa’.381 In other words, empire is as quintessentially and complicatedly ‘British’ as all those other cultural staples of national identity. Such sentiments were echoed by Sivanandan’s assertion that racism ‘is as English as Shakespeare and as old as slavery’.382 The widespread inability to recognise this bald fact has been in large part due to the strength of Britain’s memory of the Second World War with all its attendant familiarity, convenience and comfort. Memories of the imperial past were swiftly forgotten or repressed.383 In his 1978 lecture, ‘Racism and Reaction’, Hall made the case that

the development of an indigenous British racism in the post-war period begins with the profound historical forgetfulness – what I want to call the loss of historical memory, a kind of historical amnesia, a decisive mental repression – which has overtaken the British people about race and empire since the 1950s. Paradoxically, it seems to me, the native home-grown variety of racism begins with this attempt to wipe out and efface every trace of the colonial and imperial past. Clearly, that is one effect of the traumatic adjustment to the very process of bringing empire to an end. But, undoubtedly, it has left an enormous reservoir of guilt, and a deep, historical resentment. It’s not possible to operate surgically so directly on popular memory without leaving scars and traces…Thus, that history has to be reckoned with, by one way or another.384

380 Helen Davis, Understanding Stuart Hall (London, 2004), p. 101.381 Hall, ‘Racism and Reaction, 1978’, in Davison, Featherston, Rustin and Schwarz (eds.), Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and other essays – Stuart Hall, p.145. 382 Sivanandan, ‘Britain’s Gulags’ in Sivanandan (ed.), Communities of Resistance, p. 131.383 A number of scholars across academic disciplines have made such observations regarding the strength of Second World War memory over imperial/colonial memory in Britain. See Gilroy, Post-colonial Melancholia, pp. 87-90; Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-colonial Britain, pp. 17-22; Tony Kushner, The Battle of Britishness: Migrant Journeys, 1685 to the Present (Manchester, 2012), p. 23.384 Hall, ‘Racism and Reaction, 1978’, in Davison, Featherstone, Rustin and Schwarz (eds.), Selected Political Writings (London, 2017), p. 143.

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Hall grappled with the historical consequences of the colonial past and applied its (mis)memory to his analyses of contemporary racism and existing socio-economic inequalities. Anti-racists, in various ways, sought to reckon with this history and rescue it from erasure. The invocation of colonial memory by anti-racists was, then, also an exercise in restoration. For the more historically aware among them, racism was understood within the broader historical context of colonialism and ‘otherness’ and activist intellectuals were usually the keenest to make this connection. Racism was not understood as a recent development, emerging at some vague moment during the late 1940s with the first post-colonial arrivals (carrying as it did the implicit suggestion that racism was the fault of the victims) but as a phenomenon with a long and variegated history. Subsequently, for such activists in the 1980s and 1990s, Britain’s imperial history had by no means come to a close. Despite the newly post-imperial and post-colonial status of Britain, the country’s empire story was not over.

The language used by anti-racist intellectuals such as Paul Gilroy, Jenny Bourne, Stuart Hall and Ambalavaner Sivanandan was shaped by the intellectual framework of Marxism. ‘Race’ and class were the central points of reference in any analysis of society and culture. Yet, as Geoff Eley has noted in his attempt to historicise this thinking about ‘race’ in the 1970s and 1980s, while such thinkers sought to take the concept of ‘race’ seriously, class conflict remained – in analytical terms - the ‘prime mover’.385 This resulted in a distinctly materialist reading of the history of imperialism and racism. For Sivanandan, this synthesis between ‘race’ and class contributed to his emancipatory vision of contemporary anti-racism in which the struggle against racism ‘was a struggle for class.’386 The parameters of the anti-racist struggle could, therefore, be broad. As well as encompassing class, anti-racist activism was also necessarily anti-imperialist.387 The CARF summarised this approach by stating in no uncertain terms that ‘the anti-racist struggle cannot be separated from the anti-imperialist struggle’.388 Colonial memories, whether as lived experiences or transmitted generationally, were therefore brought to bear upon resistance to

385 Geoff Eley, ‘The Trouble with ‘Race’: Migrancy, Cultural Difference and the Remaking of Europe’, in Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley and Atina Grossmann (eds.), After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (Michigan, 2009), pp. 166-167. 386 Ambalavaner Sivanandan, ‘From resistance to rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles in Britain’, Race & Class, Vol. 23, No. 2/3 (1981/1982), p.138.387 Ibid., p.143. 388 ‘Editorial’, CARF (September/October 1992), p. 2.

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racism in the workplace, neighbourhoods and British society at large. The anti-imperialist dimension is also distinctive of the strong intellectual influence of Marxist and anti-colonial thought within this strain of anti-racist activism. It was not simply enough to resist racism in the metropole, activists were required to situate themselves within and commit to a larger universal project of emancipation from oppression. In this respect, connections were drawn between the historical manner in which former colonies were governed and the contemporary treatment of the black and post-colonial presence in Britain by the state. Speaking in the CARF supplement pages of Searchlight, anti-racist activist Wayne Farrah addressed the question of black self-organisation. He criticised the neo-colonial ‘white gaze’ of British anti-racism, rejecting ‘the assumption of some white groups that their opposition to racism automatically makes them the leaders of the Black struggle’.389 Farrah connected this contemporary concern to the colonial legacies of the past, stating that centuries of ‘imperialism has robbed us of control of our own destiny and resources’.390 The colonial past did not just explain the structural disadvantages of post-colonial communities in Britain and the reality of racism, but it also contributed to what Farrah clearly viewed as the chauvinism of white, left-wing anti-racism.

Such (post)colonial realities were the reason why anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles required ‘going against the grain’. It required activists to step beyond the mainstream of post-colonial forgetting and to remember the colonial past which had indelibly shaped the present. Sivanandan argued that colonialism was far from dead and that anti-racists were to continue the anticolonial struggle;

‘I think that it’s a mistake to think of colonialism as a one way street, as something that is done to you, as something that takes you over, something so powerful you can’t resist it. There is always a resistance somewhere that comes out of your own culture, your language, your religion. And that resistance first takes the form of an existential rebellion – a rebellion against everything that goes against your grain.’391

389 ‘Wayne Farrah, ‘CARF: Revolutionary Nationalism in the Black Struggle’, Searchlight (December 1988), p. 19.390 Ibid., 19. 391 Ambalavaner Sivanandan, ‘The heart is where the battle is: an interview with A. Sivanandan’, Race & Class, Vol. 59:4 (2018), p. 5.

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Sivanandan rejected the notion that colonialism was something that happened to the colonised, rendering them passive in the face of its implementation. In this way, anticolonial and anti-racist activism in the late twentieth century could be understood as a restorative exercise. It was, however, towards the end of the 1980s that the empire and its legacies appeared to return to the fore of public debates on either side of the Channel. This return also entailed a new cultural shift in the nature of racism as it turned towards Islam and Muslims as the primary target of opprobrium.

1989: From Rushdie to l’affaire du foulard On Valentine’s Day 1989, a fatwa was proclaimed against the Indian-born British novelist, Salman Rushdie, by Ayatollah Khomeini.392 Rushdie’s latest novel, The Satanic Verses had been published in the autumn of 1988 and was swiftly denounced as ‘blasphemous’ for its depiction of Muhammad and central themes of Islamic belief. The LICRA was swift in its condemnation of Khomeini’s ‘l’appel au meurtre’.393 The LICRA’s report on ‘l’affaire Rushdie’ placed it in truly transnational terms (‘une affaire internationale’), and reported on the protests against The Satanic Verses taking place ‘[à] Bradford…à Bayrouth, à Karachi, à New Dehli [sic]’ by those calling for an ‘autodafé’ on Rushdie.394 While the organisation interpreted the Rushdie affair in terms of individual liberties and free speech, it also framed the affair in terms of its ‘thèmes d’intolérance et de racisme’. The MRAP’s response, in contrast, was relatively muted and subsumed the Rushdie Affair into broader discussions about laïcité and tolerance in French society.395 Indeed, the Rushdie affair as well as the bicentenary of the French Revolution prised open serious questions about national identity and heralded the appearance of ‘the language of neo-republicanism’ across a wide range of public debate.396 While the Rushdie Affair sparked serious debates about freedom of speech and artistic license, anti-racists were more concerned by the faultlines it exposed over integration, multiculturalism and cultural racism. The affaire des foulards or headscarf affair

392 See, in particular, Kenan Malik, From fatwa to jihad: the Rushdie Affair and its Legacy (London, 2017). 393 Jean Pierre-Bloch, ‘Une menace pour l’intégration’, Le Droit de Vivre (March-April 1989), p. 1. 394 ‘L’affaire Rushdie ouvre des debats en France et dans le monde’, Le Droit de Vivre (March-April 1989), p. 16.395 See, for example, ‘Intolérance’, Différences (March 1989), p. 2: see also, Chérifa Benabessadok, ‘Islam et Laïcité’, Différences (May 1989), pp. 6-7. 396 Chabal, A Divided Republic, p. 65.

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which emerged later that year posed significant challenges to French anti-racist organisations and divided them along the lines of, on one side, a commitment to the universalism of French republicanism and, on the other, the pluralistic ideals of ‘le droit à la différence’. The late 1980s and beginning of the 1990s saw questions surrounding immigration, national identity and definitions of citizenship move to the centre of French public discourse.397

In October 1989, three Muslim girls – Samira Saidani, Leila and Fatima Achaboun - were expelled from the Lycée Gabriel Havez in Creil by the headmaster, Ernest Chernière, for their refusal to remove their headscarves in school. Cherniere insisted that he was abiding by the republican principle of laïcite. The situation quickly became a subject of frenzied national debate, symbolised by the hyperbolic warning of the affair by a number of prominent intellectuals in the November issue of Le Nouvel Observateur as a potential ‘Munich of the republican school’.398 Depicting the voile (veil) as a deadly threat to the integrity of the ‘one and indivisible’ French republic ensured that the issue was raised to a level of national concern. The Socialist Minister of Education, Lionel Jospin, referred the matter to the Conseil d’Etat which ruled on 27 November that the wearing of religious symbols (a euphemism which largely meant Islamic religious wear) were not necessarily in violation of the principle of laicite as long as they were not ‘ostentatious or polemical’.399

For French anti-racism, the affaire des foulards was a contentious issue which raised overlapping questions about French identity, racism, religious culture and sexism. Saïd Bouamama identified the ‘headscarf affair’ as a test which French anti-racism in general failed. He was particularly concerned by the republican revival of laïcité as a means of negating cultural difference.400 In November 1989, the LICRA issued a formal response stating its position on the affair. While it reaffirmed its ‘unwavering commitment’ to public schools being ‘open to all without distinction of race, religion or ethnic origin’, the LICRA nevertheless,

estime que les convictions religieuses et les opinions politiques ne doivent pas pénétrer dans l'école sous peine de mettre en péril le caractère universaliste de son enseignement. Hors de l'école publique

397 Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, p. 131. 398 Elizabeth Badinter, Régis Debray, Alain Finkielkraut, Elizabeth de Fontenay and Catherin Kintzler, ‘Profs, ne capitulons pas!’, Le Nouvel Observateur (November 1989).399 Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Woodstock, 2007), pp. 24-25). 400 Bouamama, Dix ans de marche des Beurs, p. 222.

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et laïque chacun a le libre droit d'affirmer son attachement à une foi, à une philosophie, à un ideal.401

Such a profession of faith in universalist ideals, particularly in the context of the French education system, could be interpreted as the LICRA’s adoption of the neo-republican language of the late 1980s. However, given the LICRA’s longstanding commitment to republican values, it is also not particularly surprising that the LICRA took such a stance. In a joint statement with the Syndicat national des enseignements de second degree (SNES), the MRAP called for ‘laïcite et pluralisme’.402 The MRAP acknowledge the complex questions facing France over the integration of Islam in wider society. The affaire du foulard was fundamentally post-colonial in nature and reflected the continuities between France’s long colonial past and its very real implications on the post-colonial present. In a communique on 9 November, the MRAP expressed its concern that the affaire du foulard might contribute to o a rise in ‘racisme anti-maghrebin’.403 The media attention surrounding the affaire du foulard saw the resurfacing of colonial stereotypes about North African immigrants. Despite this, the initial responses of the LICRA and the MRAP did not address the extent to which the affair was rooted in France’s imperial legacy. The preoccupying themes raised by the bicentenary of the French Revolution – addressing citizenship, national identity and secularism – took precedence over the historical resonance of contemporary events.

ConclusionIn this survey of anti-racist colonial memory in the 1980s, I have sought to demonstrate the uneven and fragmented nature of memories of British and French colonialism. However, this was highly dependent on the institutional character and histories of individual anti-racist organisations and their personnel. There were significant differences in this matter between two of the older French anti-racist associations, the LICRA and the MRAP. Despite its

401 The LICRA ‘believes that religious beliefs and political opinions should not enter the school so as not to endanger the universalist character of its teaching. Outside the public and secular school all have the right to affirm his attachment to a faith, a philosophy, an ideal’.: ‘Position de la LICRA’, Le Droit de Vivre (November 1989).402 ‘Declaration commune SNES-MRAP’, Différences (November 1989), p. 5. 403 Quoted in Albert Lévy, ‘Rejoignez le MRAP’, Différences (December 1989), p. 1.

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commitment to challenging all manifestations of racism (as evidenced by its name change in 1979), the LICRA nevertheless continued to focus primarily on monitoring and counteracting antisemitism in France. While Le Droit de Vivre reported on and condemned individual cases of racist violence and injustice towards French North Africans, there was seldom any reference to the post-colonial context of this racism nor to the traumatic colonial history of France. In Britain, the connections drawn between contemporary racism and Britain’s imperial past were made far more frequently and powerfully by anti-racist intellectuals and in journals such as Race & Class. The lived experiences of individuals such as Amabalavaner Sivanandan and Stuart Hall were crucial to the development of analyses of post-colonial racism. In Searchlight, with its deep roots in the anti-fascist tradition and the dominance of the memory of the Second World War, colonial memory received little to no attention. Awareness of the dynamics between and across anti-racist organisations on either side of the Channel is crucial to understanding how and why memories of European colonialism were either featured or side-lined.

CHAPTER THREE

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‘Anti-racist nonsense’?: Anti-racism and its Detractors, c.1982-1990

Anti-racists on both sides of the Channel had no shortage of critics. Such critics could be found both within and outside anti-racist circles. This chapter will focus on the external hostility anti-racists faced. While this hostility came from the right, centre and, sometimes, the left of politics, the loudest and most damaging appraisals of anti-racism came from the conservative and republican right in Britain and France respectively. In the broader context of the emergence of the New Right/Nouvelle Droite, the attack on anti-racism was not a simple case of identifying political and ideological enemies to be challenged and smeared. Instead, it was much more revealing of contemporary anxieties which raised deeper questions concerning national identity, immigration and ethnicity. History and memory provided a rocky and difficult terrain upon which such questions could be explored.

In the 1980s, the New Right/Nouvelle Droite had moved beyond the political and philosophical fringes and had emerged as a considerable intellectual force challenging the orthodoxies of the political left. Representing as it did a broad spectrum of right-wing thought, sections of the New Right also challenged the market-oriented and monetarist turn of its peers - of whom Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism was the key embodiment.404 Yet within this spectrum, it was those who prioritised questions of national identity, cultural heritage and social cohesion who focused their ire on anti-racists. Before proceeding, it is important to establish that, in spite of the different political cultures in which they emerged in the 1980s, crucial differences and overlaps existed between the French Nouvelle Droite and the British New Right. In acknowledgement of some of the national and cultural distinctions that existed between the movements in both countries, as well as for the sake of accuracy, the term Nouvelle Droite will be used in the case of France and New Right when referring to Britain. It will, however, be made clear how these movements and their associated ideas intersected, exposing similarities on issues of national identity and culture.

The writings of New Right ideologues and commentators in Britain cast anti-racism as the vanguard movement of the ‘loony left’, threatening political

404 Anna Marie Smith, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality: Britain, 1968-1990 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 5.

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stability and social order by preaching the gospel of ‘multiracialism’ or, as it would become more commonly known, ‘multiculturalism’.405 While members and associated organisations of the Nouvelle Droite criticised anti-racism in France, it never reached the same pitch of popular lampooning. The varying strength of the challenges levelled by the New Right to anti-racists can be illustrated by contrasting the state of anti-racism on both sides of the Channel in the middle of 1980s. SOS Racisme came in for criticism by fellow anti-racists and the MRAP was particularly critical of what it saw as its apolitical stance.406 However, SOS Racisme’s undeniable success in mobilising large numbers of people around its popular slogan ‘Touche pas à mon pote!’ – nearly half a million flocked to the SOS Racisme concert held in June 1985 in Paris - and its government-sponsored anti-racism seriously limited the scope and reception of anti-anti-racist critique.407 In sharp contrast, under a Conservative government emboldened by winning an additional 144 seats in the general election of 1983 - following on from the Falklands conflict the previous year which proved to be of significant electoral advantage408 - anti-racism in Britain was, by the middle of the 1980s, riven by internal divisions and under siege from external attackers. It was described by one of the national tabloids as an ‘evil force’ and lambasted in The Times as a ‘new intolerance’.409

The British New Right and the French Nouvelle Droite shared in common views on ‘race’ and racism enshrouded in the language of cultural difference.410 The reconfiguration of racism in the 1970s and 1980s in such terms has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention.411 Anti-racists alive to the ever-changing nature of racism also researched what quickly became known as the New Racism.412 The tropes and themes of the New Right and the New Racism are key to understanding the debates that emerged over racism and anti-racism 405 See Paul Gordon, ‘A Dirty War: The New Right and Local Authority Anti-Racism’ in Wendy Ball and John Solomos (eds.), Race and Local Politics (Basingstoke, 1990). 406 Jean Michel-Ollé, ‘Deux marches, c’est beaucoup: Est-ce que c’est trop?’, Différences (December 1985), p. 7.407 Peter Fysh and Jim Wolfreys, The Politics of Racism in France (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 174. 408 See Eric J. Evans, Thatcher and Thatcherism (London, 1987), pp. 98-99. However, the influence of the ‘Falklands Factor’ on Thatcher’s re-election in 198 has been disputed. See, for example, Richard Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s (London, 2009), pp. 151-152. 409 Ray Honeyford, ‘The most evil force in Britain’, Daily Mail (20 October 1986), p. 6; Editorial, ‘The New Intolerance’, The Times (28 March 1986).410 MacMaster, Racism in Europe, 1870-2000, p. 195. 411 See Ruth Levitas (eds.), The Ideology of the New Right (Cambridge, 1986): MacMaster, Racism in Europe, pp. 195-200; Smith, New Right Discourse on race and sexuality, 1968-1990 (Cambridge, 1995).

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in the 1980s. It is beyond the scope of the present study to explore in the detail the contemporary history of the contentious dynamics between British and French racism and anti-racism here. Instead, this chapter will demonstrate the extent to which criticism of and hostility to anti-racism (what has, in the British context, been popularly referred to as anti-anti-racism) was rooted as much in competing interpretations of the past as it was in questions of national and cultural identity. Furthermore, this chapter will investigate the extent to which the tensions between conservatives and anti-racists rested upon competing cultural memories and contested national narratives of the past. Historical references were frequently deployed by critics of anti-racism in order to lay claim to national history. Indeed, the debate between anti-racism and anti-anti-racism appeared to be as much about the past and its ownership as it was about the contemporary realities and lived experiences of racism.

This chapter will focus on the intellectual wing of British and French critics of anti-anti-racism. Publications like The Salisbury Review (which, in Britain, became the most important platform for conservative critiques of anti-racism) as well as the writings of intellectuals such as Pierre-André Taguieff and Paul Yonnet. Both articulated their criticisms of anti-racism in different ways though they nevertheless shared objections to anti-racist historical memory. These were critics who, despite the sometimes dismissive and derisive tone of their writing, nevertheless took anti-racism and anti-racists seriously, reflecting on the role anti-racism played within wider society and the culture. This chapter will also explore the extent to which criticisms of anti-racism filtered into broader public awareness. Dismissing anti-racism became a particular feature in the sensationalist tabloid press in Britain. This coincided with public and political derision of the ‘loony left’ of which anti-racists were appointed (by the right) as the primary representatives. While anti-racism became something of a favoured bête noire for publications like The Salisbury Review, its criticisms – made by contributors from a broad range of backgrounds – are crucial to understanding the role played by anti-anti-racists in contributing to the shifting thought and practice within and between anti-racist organisations. By examining both intellectual and populist critiques of anti-racism (particularly in the context of competing narratives of the past) this chapter aims to present a rounded picture of the challenges faced by anti-racist memory. 412 See Martin Barker, The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe (London, 1981): Paul Gordon and Francesca Klug, New Right, New Racism (London, 1986).

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The New Right, ‘Race’ and Cultural Difference

The Nouvelle Droite was a political, cultural and intellectual phenomenon which emerged in the late 1960s in France. Its birth has largely been attributed to the formation of Alain de Benoist’s Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE) in 1968.413 Through thinktanks such as GRECE and the Club d’horloge, the Nouvelle Droite laid claim to a diverse European heritage of right-wing and revolutionary conservative thought. Notwithstanding these continuities – both real and imagined - the Nouvelle Droite nevertheless represented a radical break from its intellectual and political predecessors due to its interest in and embrace of New Left thought. The influence of the intellectual legacy of the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci on the New Left was also apparent in the thought of the French Nouvelle Droite and, to a lesser extent, the British New Right, particularly in its emphasis on the primary importance of culture and cultural media in reshaping society.414 The idea of ‘cultural struggle’ and competition between two opposing hegemonies (left vs. right, anti-anti-racism vs. anti-racism) was central to this.415 Over the course of the 1970s, GRECE would prove to be an important conduit for the intellectual development and reappraisal of conservative thought in France.416 The GRECE’s collective reflections on the state of ‘Western civilisation’ and conservative politics soon fanned out beyond France, breathing new life into right-wing thinking about nation, culture and history. The Nouvelle Droite, as Nigel Copsey has demonstrated, had a significant influence on the far-right fringes of British politics (particularly on past and present members of the National Front and BNP, such as Nick Griffin). Its intellectual dimension also appealed to social and moral conservatives who grappled with questions of national identity, culture and history in a post-industrial, post-imperial and increasingly diverse country.417 In Britain, the New Right was not so much a singular, unified movement as it was a broad collection of political thinkers, groups and journals

413 Christian Ambrosi, Arlette Ambrosi and Bernadette Galloux, La France de 1870 à nos jours (Paris, 2004), p. 377.414 Tamir Bar-On, ‘The Ambiguities of the Nouvelle Droite, 1968-1999’, in The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 6:3 (2001), p. 336. 415 Gill Seidel, ‘Culture, Nation and ‘Race’ in the British and French New Right’, in Ruth Levitas (ed.), The Ideology of the New Right (Oxford, 1986), p. 107. 416 MacMaster, Racism in Europe, p. 196. 417 On the influence of the Nouvelle Droite on British far-right and the transnational exchange of ideas see Nigel Copsey, ‘Au Revoir to “Sacred Cows”? Assessing the Impact of the Nouvelle Droite in Britain’, Democracy and Security, 9:3 (2013), pp. 287-303.

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on the political right who largely rejected the ‘new moral geography of politics’ which had emerged in the post-’68 era and sought to reassess and promote the return of society to conservative social and moral values.418 The Conservative Party’s monetarist turn and newfound preoccupation with the deregulation of the market economy was viewed by some observers such as Roger Scruton as coming at the expense of traditional conservatism.419 The turbulence of Britain’s economy during the 1970s – culminating in Britain’s $3 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund in 1976 – and the fractured state of politics set the tone for the reflections on identity for a new generation of conservative thinkers disaffected by Thatcherism and the political culture of the left.

One of the key features that distinguished the British New Right from the Nouvelle Droite was the latter’s willingness to flirt with ideas and individuals on the far-right end of the political spectrum, situating themselves within a French and European tradition of fascist thought. The influence of a diverse array of revolutionary conservative thinkers such as Julius Evola and Charles Maurras underpinned the Nouvelle Droite and reflected its inheritance in what Taguieff identified as a ‘European nationalism’ which concerned itself with the defence of the ‘West’.420 Subsequently, the Nouvelle Droite could claim to be in possession of an internally coherent and consistent école de pensée.421 While the British New Right counted among its members those who advocated policies such as voluntary and involuntary repatriation, it cannot be said to have shared the same European outlook, exhibiting instead a distinctive Euroscepticism. It is, however, important to bear in mind that just as anti-racism in Britain and France was defined by its heterogeneity and disparate political and philosophical affiliations, so too was the New Right on both sides of the Channel.

The ‘new-ness’ of the New Right lay in its rejection of what it saw as the stale and increasingly tired state of the politics of the post-war consensus and a 418 Judt, Postwar, p. 487. 419 Scruton has long sought to articulate a philosophy of conservatism, thus distinguishing between conservatism as a political project and as an idea. On his criticism of conservative supporters of Thatcher, see Dooley and Scruton, Conversations with Roger Scruton (London, 2016), pp. 45-6: for a more recent reflection on this point, see also Julia Llewellyn Smith, ‘Roger Scruton: Interview’, The Times (25 July 2019): https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/roger-scruton-im-vindicated-sort-of-you-just-dont-know-mttnhwz6t [Last accessed: 26/07/2019].420 Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘Origines et métamorphoses de la Nouvelle Droite’, in Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’histoire, 40 (October-December 1993), p. 4. 421 See Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la Nouvelle droite: Le G.R.E.C.E. et son histoire (Paris, 1988).

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desire to affect a rightward turn in national political culture.422 This was done by debating and reflecting on a variety of issues from questions of post-Keynesian economics, the state of education, history and immigration. In particular, the issues up for discussion by groups like The Monday Club, Club d’Horloge and The Salisbury Group usually centred around questions of national identity and belonging, the preservation of national culture and the threat ostensibly posed by the political left to national unity. At the very centre of these discussions lay the subjects of ‘race’ and cultural difference. Enoch Powell and the legacy of Powellism (especially after his notorious 1968 speech for which he was promptly sacked) played a crucial role in this reconfiguration of post-imperial conservative thought. As Camilla Schofield has argued, Powell’s concerns about ‘race’ were grounded in a ‘distinctly English, postwar and post-colonial version of nationalism’.423 To a degree, memories of empire and their transmission was stronger within the political conservatism and variants of the radical right than it was within anti-racist movements. The connections between the history and legacy of empire and the creation and endurance of British identity were inextricable. While debate continues to rage over the importance of the British Empire to the lives and concerns of ordinary Britons in the late-nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the historic possession and maintenance of a global empire played a powerful role in shaping ideas of Britishness and the place of ‘race’ within this.424 This new variant of nationalism and conservative notions of belonging also came to be embraced by the New Right. As argued in the previous chapter, the post-colonial nature of anti-racism requires further investigation. However, the resolutely post-colonial context within which anti-racists and their critics debated questions of national identity, history and memory is also in need of more scholarly engagement.

Despite being wrapped up in the language of culture, the subject of ‘race’ nevertheless served as a sharply concentrated ‘nodal point’ within the discourse of the British New Right as it did in wider political culture.425 As in France,

422 Amy Elizabeth Ansell, New Right, New Racism: Race and Reaction in the United States and Britain (London, 1997), p. 163.423 Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-colonial Britain (London, 2013), p. 3. 424 See Stuart Ward, ‘The Mackenziean Moment in Retrospect (or How One Hundred Volumes Bloomed)’, in Andrew Thompson (ed.), Writing Imperial Histories (Manchester, 2013), pp. 29-48; see also, Liam Liburd, ‘Beyond the Pale: Whiteness, Masculinity and Empire in the British Union of Fascists, 1932-1940’, in Fascism 7:2 (October 2018), pp. 275-296. 425 Smith, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality, p.10.

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‘race’ and immigration contained within themselves anxieties over the strength of contemporary British identity, culture, social cohesion as well as the nation’s standing following the loss of its global empire.426 Another scholar of the New Right has argued that ‘race’ served as

an ideological conductor for populist anxiety that the national ‘way of life’ is coming apart at the seams, and also helps bolster the credibility and power of those who promise to put it back together again.427

The question of ‘race’ was bound up with myriad contemporary anxieties. However, the language through which such concerns were expressed is important. For the New Right, such anxieties over immigration and integration were expressed through the language of cultural difference. To talk of ‘race’ and racial difference in biological terms after 1945 was to consign oneself beyond the pale of civilized political discourse. The way round this discursive constraint was to speak not in terms of the ‘superiority’ or ‘inferiority’ of ‘racial categories’, but in terms of difference.428 Powell’s 1968 speech reflected precisely this semantic shift through his suggestion that non-white people in Britain were not somehow ‘inferior’ but, rather, simply ‘different’.429 In resorting to the language of cultural difference, those on the New Right who were most animated by questions of immigration, changing demographics and British identity were able to reject the accusations of racism made against them.

Schofield has convincingly argued that Powell’s ‘populist patriotism’ set the tone for the later moral and social concerns of Thatcherism.430 By the mid-1980s, a moral panic arose over anti-racism fuelled by the New Right and tabloid media.431 The New Right was primarily concerned with whipping up a series of panics over immigration, Section 28, the AIDS crisis and the state of Britain’s inner cities.432 The nature of these moral panics fell under what Alastair Bonnett identified as the two primary themes of anti-anti-racist critiques of anti-racism. The first was that anti-racism was simply an offshoot of the extreme left in Britain and, secondly, that anti-racism was depicted as

426 See Derderian, North Africans in Contemporary France, p. 1. 427 Ansell, New Right, New Racism, p. 9.428 MacMaster, Racism in Europe, p. 195. 429 Ansell, New Right, New Racism, p. 144. 430 Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-colonial Britain, p. 224. 431 Jenny Bourne, ‘Anti-racist witchcraft’, Race & Class (January 2015), p. 70. 432 Ansell, New Right, New Racism, p. 7.

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intrinsically ‘anti-white and anti-British’.433 This raised questions about anti-racists’ apparent lack of patriotism and perpetuated the notion that being anti-racist compromised one’s commitment to or membership of the nation. Both accusations were crucial to undermining anti-racism in rhetorical terms. Paul Gordon, a researcher for the Runnymede Trust, believed that the influence of New Right thinking on Thatcher’s government was especially notable during her second ministry between 1983 and 1987. Anti-racism – specifically the anti-racist and racial equality policies proposed and enacted by local authorities following the serious urban unrest of 1981 – had been ‘seriously curtailed’ due to government legislation. More seriously, the Conservative government had created a ‘climate in which anti-racism was a dirty word and an embarrassing concept to many of those who had previously espoused it’.434

The reconfiguration of racism in the late 1970s and early 1980s was dubbed ‘cultural racism’ by anti-racists at the time. This is defined by Michel Wieviorka as an insistence ‘on an image of racial difference which is not natural or biological but contained in language, religion, tradition, national origin: it is to stress the fact that for the racist, the culture of the Other, irreconcilable with his own cultural identity’.435 The New Right’s recourse to the language of cultural difference as opposed to a language of racial hierarchy and competition allowed its proponents to deflect accusations of racism. This was also partly because the New Right had their own definition of what racism was. Racism was not understood as a belief in white supremacy or the inferiority of non-whites. Nor was racism understood as something that had been intimately woven into Britain’s history of empire-building with ‘race’ sitting at the very ‘core of politics’.436 In England: An Elegy (2000), Scruton expressed the (highly questionable) view that ‘the disquiet’ over non-white, post-colonial communities in post-war Britain was not a result of ‘racism, but of the disruption of an old experience of home, and a loss of the enchantment which made home a place of safety’.437 The conflation between immigration and insecurity, as well as the implicit suggestion that the ‘old experience of home’ prior to post-war migration

433 Alastair Bonnett, Radicalism, Anti-Racism and Representation (London, 1993), p. 50. 434 Gordon, ‘A Dirty War: The New Right and Local Authority Anti-Racism’, in Ball and Solomos (eds.), Race and Local Politics (Basingstoke, 1990), p. 176. 435 Michel Wieviorka, ‘Is it so difficult to be an anti-racist?’, in Prina Werbner and Tariq Modood (eds.), Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism (London, 2015), p. 142.436 Paul Gilroy, ‘The End of Anti-Racism’, in Wendy Ball and John Solomos (eds.), Race and Local Politics (Basingstoke, 1990), p. 195. 437 Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (London, 2001), p. 7.

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was one of ethnic homogeneity bear the hallmarks of New Right thinking on culture which dispense with the need to use terms such as ‘race’ or refer to racial difference.

This ‘cultural turn’, which became increasingly popularised and mainstreamed in the 1970s, particularly among the French Nouvelle Droite, was not solely the preserve of anti-anti-racists. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the discrediting of scientific and biological notions of ‘race’ in the wake of the Holocaust was spearheaded by UNESCO which published its Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice in 1950.438 Despite internal disputes over sociological and biological definitions of ‘race’ and its usefulness as a meaningful category of analysis, the UNESCO statement nonetheless contributed to the wider discrediting of racism’s scientific credentials.439 In so doing, it substituted the terminology of ‘race’ for terms such as ‘ethnicity’ and ‘culture’ as they were seen to be shorn of suggestions that superior or inferior cultures existed.

This culturalist approach to racism was highly influential on post-war anti-racist thinking. The embrace of cultural relativist thinking about racism by anti-racists fundamentally challenged traditional notions about the constitution of British and French society as well as existence of colonial and post-colonial communities within them. However, such a culturalist explanation of racism has not gone unchallenged. For Taguieff, this had perilous consequences. Taguieff argued that cultural relativist thought was so influential on anti-racism that it unwittingly provided the Nouvelle Droite and the Front National in the 1980s with their own cultural language of difference or, to be more precise, cultural racism.440 Taguieff’s analysis has been criticised by both Alana Lentin and Étienne Balibar for taking a highly present-ist approach to understanding the emergence of the New Racism and failing to examine it in its longer historical context. Balibar in particular has taken Taguieff to task for his failure to understand the emergence of the New Racism in the context of the centrality of

438 Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe, pp. 74-76. 439 Elazan Barkan, ‘Race and the Social Sciences’, in Theodore R. Porter and Dorothy Ross (eds.), Cambridge History of the Social and Behavioural Sciences (New York, 2003), p. 15.440 Pierre André-Taguieff, Face au racisme 2: Analyses, hypothèses, perspectives (Paris, 1991), p. 54.

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racism and ‘race-thinking’ to nineteenth-century European notions of modernity and progress.441

For critics of anti-racism, understanding racism as a phenomenon intimately woven into the very fabric of European modernity, as well as a ‘structural’ phenomenon inherent within the social structures and institutions was regarded, to use the words of one anti-anti-racist, as ‘almost entirely bogus’.442 However anti-racists understood and explained racism, their anti-anti-racist critics would swiftly reject it. For Paul Gilroy, this was due in large part to the failure of anti-racists to adequately define racism. In an essay entitled ‘The End of Anti-Racism’ Gilroy argued that the ‘moralistic excesses’ and ‘dictatorial character’ of anti-racism in the 1980s had opened it up to widespread mockery and hostility from the government which had, in turn, been egged on by anti-anti-racist crusade of the tabloid media. He observed that anti-racism was suffering from a lack of organisational structures which hindered popular anti-racist mobilisation and that, crucially, anti-racism was undergoing a ‘crisis of political language, images and cultural symbols’.443 Such a crisis had prevented anti-racists from articulating a consensual definition of racism wrapped around an understanding of the subtle but central place of ‘race’ within ‘British cultural nationalism’.444 The absence of ‘race’ or biological determinism from the rhetoric of New Right thinkers and politicians – discredited as it was – did not alter the fact that a popular elision remained between whiteness and Britishness. That the ‘populist character of the new racism…transmits the idea of the British people as the white people’ was, for Gilroy, the key point.445 And it was this point that too many anti-racists were missing.

Anti-anti-racism as an important tributary of New Right thought was, therefore, a kind of resistance movement in its own right, filtering out beyond intellectual and academic circles to major newspapers and, in particular, the tabloid press. This ensured that anti-anti-racism, as an offshoot of broader New Right thought, acquired a larger audience for which, in the words of one scholar, its ideas and attendant language of culture were ‘recast in a more

441 See, Étienne Balibar, ‘Is there a “Neo-Racism”?’, in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds.), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London, 1991). 442 David Dale, ‘The New Ideology of Race’, The Salisbury Review (October 1985), p. 18. 443 Gilroy, ‘The End of Anti-Racism’, in Ball and Solomos (eds.), Race and Local Politics (Basingstoke, 1990), pp. 191-192. 444 Ibid., p. 200. 445 Ibid., p. 200.

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populist and ‘common-sense’ form’.446 This ensured that New Right ideas could be easily disseminated to a wider audience through tabloid media.

The Salisbury Review, the New Right and Anti-Racism

Founded in 1982, The Salisbury Review is an intellectual journal describing itself as a ‘quarterly magazine of conservative thought’. Its origins lay in the Salisbury Group, a conservative association established in the mid-1970s in opposition to the Conservative Party’s reorientation under Thatcher’s helm since becoming leader of the party in 1975. The philosopher, Roger Scruton, edited the review between 1982 and 2000 and intended for it to serve as a platform for the ‘revival of conservative thought’ which had taken on a renewed vigour in response to the liberalising legacy of the ’68 years.447 The journal also served as a forum for the expression of concerns and anxieties shared by moral and social conservatives over the reconfiguration of the Conservative Party under Thatcher as a political force devoted to economic liberalism and monetarism rather than the conservation of traditional social and cultural mores.448 The Salisbury Group created a network of conservative journalists and academics and contributors to the Review came from a broad range of career backgrounds.449 John Casey was a prominent Cambridge don specialising in English. David Dale was a social worker for Westminster city council who railed against its municipal anti-racism. Ray Honeyford, a Bradford headmaster, caused a national controversy in 1984 over the views he articulated on education in multicultural schools in the Salisbury Review. Though an intellectual journal, the Salisbury Review was rather accessible to people from across a broad spectrum of career backgrounds each of whom nevertheless shared in common a socially, morally and philosophically conservative outlook on contemporary Britain.

The Review addressed a broad range of issues concerning the intellectual tradition of conservativism, economics, history as well as reflections on contemporary national identity. The Salisbury Review’s concerns were not,

446 MacMaster, Racism in Europe, p. 197. 447 Roger Scruton and Christopher Sylvester, ‘Editorial’, The Salisbury Review (Autumn 1982), p. 37. 448 Ibid, p. 37. 449 Scruton would later describe the members of this network as ‘a weird collection of people, some of whom were useless old cranks and some of whom were very interesting.’: Dooley and Scruton, Conversations with Roger Scruton, p. 47.

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however, limited to domestic issues. Scruton and fellow contributors were also animated by their support for the resistance against communism by Czech, Polish and other eastern European dissidents. The journal regularly featured their translated essays with Vaclav Havel serving as an occasional contributor.450 The Salisbury Review was, therefore, deeply rooted in the political and cultural context of the Cold War and presented itself as a bastion of traditional conservative thought navigating its own Scylla and Charybdis of Thatcherism and what appeared at the time to be a hegemonic left-wing political culture.

From its inception, The Salisbury Review was a scourge of the political left. Despite Thatcher’s premiership and the fact that right-wing parliamentary politics was in the ascendancy, the Salisbury Review nevertheless expressed concern with what it saw as the strong influence of left-wing thinking in wider British political culture. As a result of some of its featured essays covering topics such as Marxism, feminism, cultural relativism and anti-racism, the Salisbury Review – condemned in Race Today as a ‘contentious and obscene right wing journal’451 - came in for sharp criticism. Such was the scrutiny with which the review was read by its detractors that, in 1988, its editor claimed it had been ‘severely persecuted’.452 In criticising the political left and anti-racism, Scruton lamented that ‘the left-wing journals – New Statesman, Searchlight, Granta, and many more – have uttered an endless stream of libellous rant against a phenomenon which clearly surpasses their understanding’.453 On the left, close attention was paid to ‘the infiltration of neo-fascist ideas’ into the mainstream of British politics, particularly the Conservative Party.454 Searchlight magazine was particularly attuned to the themes and concerns of the New Right and its influence in the Conservative party. During the Falklands War, Searchlight reported on the ‘Racist Tory Right’ and its championing of ‘a resurgent ‘national ‘identity’.455 Later in the same year, Searchlight also carried a profile of Scruton, describing him as ‘Thatcher’s philosopher’ and examined the influence of his articulation of conservatism on policies concerning

450 See Vaclav Havel, ‘Politics and Conscience’, trans. by Erazim Kohák and Roger Scruton, The Salisbury Review (January 1985). 451 ‘Schooling Crisis in Bedford’, Race Today (July/August 1984), p. 11. 452 Roger Scruton (ed.), Conservative Thoughts: Essays from The Salisbury Review (London, 1988), p. 7. 453 Scruton (ed.), Conservative Thoughts, p. 8.454 David Edgar, ‘On the Race Track’, Marxism Today (November 1988), p. 28.455 ‘The Influence of the Racist Tory Right’, Searchlight (January 1983), pp. 10-11.

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immigration and multiculturalism.456 The Salisbury Review’s commitment to free thought and repeated assertions of innocence in the face of accusations of racism would be a recurring theme throughout the 1980s.

The shadow of Powell loomed large over the British New Right as it did over national questions of ‘race’, immigration and belonging more generally. Indeed, the former member of parliament for Wolverhampton occasionally contributed essays and book reviews to the Salisbury Review from its inception until his death in 1998. Powell’s book reviews in particular show him to be partially attuned to the latest developments of sociological thinking about ‘race’ and racism. In 1987, he reviewed Gideon Ben-Tovim’s The Local Politics of Race (1986), John Rex’s Race and Ethnicity (1986) and Zig Layton-Henry and Paul B. Rich’s edited book Race, Government and Politics in Britain (1986). While Powell – an accomplished classicist and academic - kept an eye on the latest thinking about these topics, he took a dim view of the above monographs and criticised what he saw as the suspect political leanings and aspirations of their authors.457 Like fellow anti-anti-racists writing in The Salisbury Review, Powell was alarmed by what he saw as the academic legitimacy being given to anti-racist thought and its encouragement of anti-racist activism in British streets and communities.

The emphasis on culture over ‘race’ allowed the New Right to distance itself – to a certain degree – from accusations of racism which could be dismissed through ridiculing political opponents and dismissing them as hysterical or over-zealous. Indeed, one of the key features of New Right thought was its claim to be firmly rooted in the ‘tradition’ of British ‘common sense’ as well as being the ostensible guardians of a quintessential ‘Englishness’.458 However, trying to pin down what ‘Britishness’ might be or what constitutes its defining characteristics continues to present challenges.459 This allowed New Right thinkers and politicians to present themselves as the intermediaries between ordinary British people and the elite institutions. Indeed, they could do this with some justification as Roger Scruton contributed weekly columns to

456 ‘Roger Scruton: Portrait of a Hard-Right Ideologue’, Searchlight (December 1983), pp. 4-5. 457 J. Enoch Powell, ‘Book Review’, The Salisbury Review (September 1987), pp. 65-67.458 Though contributors to the Salisbury Review frequently refer to Britain or the United Kingdom in their essays, it is nevertheless clear that England is the primary national context in which their concerns are framed. 459 Tony Kushner, The Battle of Britishness: Migrant Journeys, 1685 to the Present (Manchester, 2012), p. 22.

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The Times while Ray Honeyford, during and following the controversy for which he became publicly known, became a regular contributor to the Daily Mail. In reasserting the fact that the problem was not differences in ‘race’ but in culture, the voices of the New Right asserted that being racist was, therefore, a moral problem and a question of personal choice rather than something determined by the society in which one lived. This was the view of Anthony Flew, the distinguished English philosopher, who contributed essays to the Salisbury Review reflecting on the nature of racism.460 For Flew, as for fellow New Right thinkers, to be a committed racist with a firm belief in one’s racial superiority was little more than a character flaw or individual failing. Some went further, like Enoch Powell himself, and argued that racism was simply a fact of the human condition and had been since time immemorial.461 In other words, racism was a regrettable but natural part of life. Anti-anti-racists were also adamant that racism was ‘not the exclusive property of white people’ but rather something to which anyone (regardless of the colour of their skin) could be susceptible.462

The anti-racist playwright and contributor to Marxism Today, David Edgar, was especially attentive to the role of contemporary political culture in laying the groundwork for a conflict between anti-racism and its critics. Edgar accounted for the government- and media-led assault on anti-racism in the mid-1980s in terms of the Conservative government’s refusal to accept that racism was nothing but a personal preference and moral failing. In doing so, it failed to recognise that racism could exist let alone operate at a structural level. As a result, anti-racist campaigns by local councils organisations and activist groups was, for its critics, ‘as absurd a notion as a collective campaign against sin’.463 On the subject of sin, Terry Drummond of Christians against Fascism and Racism (CARAF) – an organisation founded in 1978 as a ‘joint initiative’ of cross-denominational Christian associations464 - was a vocal critic of the British New Right and, in particular, the Salisbury Review. Drummond condemned the Review for what he saw as its dangerous legitimisation of the far-right. He argued that ‘the element of authoritarian [sic] within these political attitudes can be seen to imitate the origins of fascism in the 1920s-30s and, as such, 460 Anthony Flew, ‘Three Concepts of Racism’, The Salisbury Review (October 1986), p. 2. 461 Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-colonial Britain, p. 214. 462 Dale, ‘The New Ideology of Race’, The Salisbury Review (October 1985), p. 20. 463 David Edgar, ‘The Morals Dilemma’, Marxism Today (October 1987), p. 21. 464 Christians against Racism and Fascism (CARAF) pamphlet, (1980).

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represent a dangerous move towards positions that many feel had declined in the post-war period’.465 For Drummond, as for many anti-racist critics of the New Right and Salisbury Review, historical memories of the Second World War and interwar antisemitism came to mind. When anti-racists and their New Right critics debated ‘race’ and racism, both camps started from very different intellectual positions. A large gulf also lay between their respective positions on the legacy of colonialism.

History, Memory and Disputed Terrain

The dispute between anti-racism and its detractors cannot simply be understood as the latest manifestation of the ‘culture wars’ raging in the 1980s between the left and right. At the very heart of the discord between anti-racists and the New Right in Britain were profoundly opposed interpretations of the national narrative of the past and visions of its future. The historical memory of Britain’s empire was contested and its legacy came in for frequent debate as critics condemned what they perceived as anti-racists’ excessively guilt-ridden view of the imperial past.

The Falklands War of 1982 played an important role in the resurgence of popular memories of the Second World War as well as Britain’s former status as a global, imperial power. Stuart Hall was quick to notice during the short-lived conflict that, despite now being a post-imperial nation, the ‘imperial flag…is still flying in the collective unconscious’ and that the Thatcher government had succeeded in resurrecting the emotive ‘language of the Battle of Jutland and the Battle of Britain’.466 Going further, Eric Hobsbawm mused that Britons had ‘lost their marbles’ over the Falklands War which he interpreted as a clear and delayed reaction to Britain’s national decline and loss of empire.467 This imperial psychodrama had been preceded by a fundamental redefinition of British national identity. In 1981, the British Nationality Act created a three-tiered citizenship with an emphasis on parentage and descent over geography. The meaning of this legislation, Kathleen Paul has argued, lies in the broader

465 See Cpt. Terry Drummond, ‘The Salisbury Review group – an Introduction’, CARAF (no date).466 Hall, ‘The empire strikes back’, in Davison, Featherstone, Rustin and Schwarz (eds.), Selected Political Writings (London, 2017), pp. 200-202. 467 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Falklands Fallout’, Marxism Today (January 1983), pp. 13-14.

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context of ‘the larger postwar discourse of blood, family, kith and kin’.468 The 1981 Act represented at once both a fundamental break with the narrowing contours of British citizenship and its associated criteria as well as the apotheosis of postwar British conceptions of who did and who did not belong to the nation. It had stripped Falkland islanders of their British citizenship, relegating them instead to the status of British Dependent Territories citizenship (unless in possession of full British citizenship through a parent or grandparent). Despite being shorn of their legal British identity, the threat of the Argentine military junta nevertheless resulted in the mobilisation of British naval and military force to protect British sovereignty and those who were regarded by Thatcher as ‘British in stock and tradition’.469 The war revealed a highly racialised understanding of who was considered British. The retrospective British Nationality (Falkland Islands) Act of 1983, which granted full British citizenship to all Falkland Islanders reflected the fact that ‘white-skinned subjects remained at the core of the British national identity’ and held the ‘most valuable privilege’ of full citizenship.470 As Thatcher herself had put it, the Falkland Islanders were ‘our own people’.471 The war had been rife with symbolism, revealing British anxieties about national decline, loss of empire as well as fundamental questions about who contemporary Britons were. The imperial nostalgia fostered by the war in the South Atlantic contributed, in part, to the memory wars waged by conservative intellectuals and their anti-racist detractors from 1982 onwards.

In the years following the Falklands conflict, anti-anti-racists condemned the ‘post-imperial guilt’ of their opponents and viewed their interpretations of Britain’s colonial past as, at best, left-wing revisionism and, at worst, yet further evidence for their lack of patriotism.472 Writing in The Salisbury Review, David Dale accused anti-racists of being ‘anxious to purge themselves of the colonial sins of their forefathers’.473 Dale ridiculed anti-racists for what he saw as their

468 Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Cornell, 1997), p. 183. 469 Margaret Thatcher, ‘House of Commons Speech, 3 April 1982’, Margaret Thatcher Foundation: https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104910 [Last accessed: 29/03/2018].470 Paul, Whitewashing Britain, p. 187.471 Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to Conservative Rally at Cheltenham, 3 July 1982’, Margaret Thatcher Foundation: https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104989 [Last accessed: 29/03/2019].472 Jonathan Savery, ‘Anti-Racism as Witchcraft’, The Salisbury Review (July 1985), p. 42. 473 David Dale, ‘The New Ideology of Race’, The Salisbury Review (October 1985), p. 20.

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desire to publicly scourge themselves and the nation at large for past colonial wrongs. In one especially inflammatory essay in the Salisbury Review, Jonathan Savery attacked anti-racists for their ‘post-imperial guilt’ and ‘squeamish consciences’.474 Savery sharply criticised anti-racist initiatives in schools. Comparing anti-racism to witchcraft, Savery condemned anti-racists for their ‘incantations: ‘oppressor’, ‘colonialist’, ‘exploiter’, ‘fascist’, ‘racist’’ and defined anti-racism as ‘a Marxist inspired political concept dedicated to structural (revolutionary) change’.475 However, Savery himself employed distinctly chauvinist and colonialist language in comparing anti-racists to the ‘Arunta Aborigines’ who condemned members of its community to death through sorcery, attempting in the process to parody what Savery saw as anti-racists’ excessive zeal in condemning racism between and among themselves.

Savery flipped anti-racist colonial history/memory on its head by arguing that ‘anti-racism is the instrument of a neo-colonialism [sic] minority, who seek domination over our domestic territories, and who wish to destroy forever the culture that has grown and flourished there’.476 The idea that it was ‘indigenous’ white Britons who were the real victims of racism and the ostensible anti-racist project to denigrate, deconstruct and ultimately reject their history and culture was a powerful one. Furthermore, the Powellite tone of such a statement was conspicuous. It was not just immigrants but also their allies, anti-racists, who were presented as the unwelcome presence – or, as Powell might have put it, ‘invaders’ who disrupted the organic evolutionary growth of the community477 - within British society. Citing a number of black British organisations, Dale argued that anti-racism’s ‘history is littered with futile attempts to create a bogus “black unity” based on a common white enemy’.478 These were unsophisticated lines of attack which depended upon hyperbole as a means of demonising anti-racism.

This hyperbole was also in evidence during one of the major flashpoints between anti-racists and anti-anti-racists in the 1980s. The Honeyford Affair of 1984/5 not only exposed the gulf that existed between those who sought to promote an inclusive and anti-racist curriculum and others who viewed this as

474 Savery, ‘Anti-Racism as Witchcraft’, The Salisbury Review, p. 42.475Ibid., p. 41.476 Jonathan Savery, ‘Strictly Anti-Racist on Fantasy Island’, The Salisbury Review (April 1987), p. 5.477 Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-colonial Britain, p. 179.478 David Dale, The New Ideology of Race, p. 20.

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the attempt of Marxists and subversives to infiltrate schools and corrupt young minds. It was also a significant moment in which contested interpretations of the national narrative and the historical memory of colonialism came under some scrutiny. Ray Honeyford was the headmaster of a Bradford school and in 1984 came to public attention as a result of an article he written for the Salisbury Review.479 The resulting furore ignited a campaign by schoolchildren’s parents and activists to have him removed from his post for what were regarded as his racist views.480 Honeyford would later argue that his words and career had been ‘besieged by an anti-racist mob’.481 Both during and following the controversy – Honeyford was suspended from his post in early 1985 and took early retirement – Honeyford became an outspoken critic of anti-racism, particularly in schools.

The Thatcher government was also outwardly hostile to anti-racism in education, dismissing the very notion of anti-racist education as part of a left-wing plot to introduce subversive themes and materials into state education. Indeed, the area of public life to which anti-racism was deemed to pose the largest threat was education.482 In October 1987, Margaret Thatcher spoke at the annual Conservative Party conference and warned delegates of the ostensible threat posed by ‘hard left education authorities and extremist teachers’ to the pupils of inner-city schools. ‘Our children’, she lamented, ‘don’t get the education they need – the education they deserve…[A]nd children who need to be able to count and multiply are learning anti-racist mathematics – whatever that may be’.483 While this quip was met with ripples of laughter, such sentiments were echoed across the political right. Denigrating the anti-racism of the ‘loony left’ became a popular way for the right to skewer the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary opposition as part of its ‘culture wars’. It was during the mid-1980s that the New Right launched what Jenny Bourne of Race & Class has described as ‘something tantamount to a moral panic about anti-racism and the politicisation of education’.484 Indeed, Thatcher’s comments echoed those of Ray Honeyford who lamented the influence of ‘Socialist and 479 ‘Disciplinary move over articles by headmaster’, The Times, 14 June 1984, p. 3. 480 ‘Protest over ‘racist’ head’, The Guardian, 17 October 1984, p. 3: see also, John Solomos, Race and Racism in Britain (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 104. 481 Ray Honeyford, ‘The most evil force in Britain’, Daily Mail (20 October 1986), p. 6.482 Bonnett, Radicalism, Anti-Racism and Representation, p.50. 483 Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to Conservative Party Conference’, Margaret Thatcher Foundation (9 October 1987): https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106941 [Last accessed: 26/06/2018].484 Bourne, ‘Anti-racist witchcraft’, Race & Class, p. 70.

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Marxist intellectuals’ in contemporary educational theory.485 Honeyford also dismissed the ‘the establishment of a whole range of non-subjects such as Peace Studies, Anti-Sexism, Multi-racial Education, Black Studies…’ in English schools.486 He, and other conservative critics of anti-racism, were particularly concerned however by the teaching of history: especially British imperial history. In 1983, Honeyford claimed that teachers were being forced

[T]o teach all our pupils to denigrate the British Empire. This unbalanced view of history inconceivably overlooks the fact that the builders of the British Empire, despite their many sins, laid the foundations of our multi-ethnic society, by conferring British citizenship on people from Asia, Africa and the West Indies.487

Honeyford regarded such a rendering of the past as fundamentally ‘anti-British’.488 However, the anti-racist reading of Britain’s past was not about denigration, dismissal or distortion. Rather, it was about confronting what Stuart Hall had described as Britain’s ‘profound historical forgetfulness…the loss of historical memory’ over the reality of the colonial past.489 This was an exercise in rescuing history from a collective amnesia in the post-colonial age.

Disputes about the national past and its contested interpretations raised questions about the kind of society anti-racists visualised. In France, the nature of these questions and the debate between anti-racism and its critics was rather different. Indeed, anti-racist memory culture was seen, by some observers, as the primary hindrance to effective anti-racist activism, preventing anti-racists from successfully challenging the new racism of cultural difference. The late 1980s saw the emergence of what the historian Emile Chabal has described as ‘neo-republicanism’ and the rehabilitation of its highly ‘symbolic vocabulary’.490 As with conservative critiques of anti-racism in Britain, the primary concern of French neo-republicans was the potential for anti-racism to foster division along ethnic lines. ‘Communautarisme’ was the mortal threat to the integrity and

485 Ray Honeyford, ‘The Right Education?’, The Salisbury Review (January 1985), p. 28. 486 Ibid, p. 29. 487 See Ray Honeyford, ‘Multi-ethnic Intolerance’ in The Salisbury Review (Summer 1983).488 Ibid. 489 Stuart Hall, ‘Racism and Reaction’, in Davison, Featherstone, Rustin and Schwarz (eds.), Selected Political Writings, p. 145. 490 Chabal, A Divided Republic, p. 81.

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unity of Republic.491 Pierre-André Taguieff had originally been on the political left – he was a situationist during his Nanterre student days in 1968 - and was active in anti-racist circles during the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this period, he was a member of the MRAP’s Committee on Racism and Antisemitism.492 Towards the end of the 1980s, however, Taguieff had become one of the most high-profile intellectual critics of anti-racism. This was largely as a result of his commitment to ‘national republicanism’ which intensified from the late 1980s to early 1990s.493 However, Taguieff was by no means an anti-anti-racist. Indeed, he made clear that his desire was to see anti-racism in France reformed ‘intellectually and morally’.494 This, therefore, was a critique of anti-racism from someone familiar with the terrain. While in Britain, criticisms of anti-racism were usually expressed by hostile publications, many of Taguieff’s criticisms of anti-racism were publicised in regular anti-racist publications such as the MRAP’s Différences and the LICRA’s Le Droit de Vivre. In comparative terms, French anti-racism operated in a far less hostile environment than in Britain where the right-wing tabloid and broadsheet media and the Conservative government made no secret of their disdain for municipal anti-racism.

In La force de la préjugé: essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (1987), Taguieff explored in detail the nature of racism and anti-racism in France, refecting in particular on what he viewed as the deficiencies and failures of the latter.495 The ideas Taguieff elaborated on in La force du préjugé were largely borne out of his research on the development of the Nouvelle Droite in France since the 1970s. Taguieff took the view that the problem with contemporary anti-racism was that excessive condemnation and punishment of racism only emboldened racial prejudice. Indeed, his analysis of the historical, epistemological and even linguistic development of anti-racist discourses led him to conclude that anti-racism had, in some cases, become little more than, as Catherine Lloyd has put it, a ‘mirror image’ of racism.496 Taguieff had traced the development of racism from its definition along biological to cultural and 491 Pierre-André Taguieff, La République Enlisée: Pluralisme, Communautarisme et Citoyenneté (Paris, 2005), pp. 23-24. 492 Lloyd, Discourses of Antiracism in France, p. 10. 493 Christopher Flood, ‘National Republican Politics, intellectuals and the case of Pierre-André Taguieff’, in Modern and Contemporary France, 12:3 (2004), p. 353. 494 Chérifa Benabdessadok, ‘Anti-racisme: Le point de vue de P.A. Taguieff’, Différences (April 1992), p. 10. 495 See Pierre-André Taguieff, La force du préjugé: essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris, 1987).496 Lloyd, Discourses of Antiracism in France, 12.

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differentialist lines and argued that contemporary anti-racism was fundamentally ill-equipped to tackle the racism of the Nouvelle Droite which was articulated through the discourse of cultural difference.497 In 1988, Taguieff wrote in Le Droit de Vivre arguing for a reappraisal of the nature of racism and anti-racism.498 He not only criticised French anti-racism’s embrace of the language of cultural difference but also expressed his scepticism regarding the efficacy of what he described as ‘anti-racisme commémoratif’. For Taguieff, an anti-racism which depended on the invocation of the memories of Nazism, the Holocaust and biological racism, disarmed itself in the face of cultural racism.499 In the following issue, a Le Droit de Vivre reader and LICRA member, Herbert Lamm, took Taguieff to task for using overly intellectual and ‘pseudo-savant’ language in his appeal to activists to ‘rethink’ racism and anti-racism. Accusing Taguieff of ‘le manque de modestie’, Lamm nevertheless concurred with Taguieff that anti-racist historical memory had indeed become too limiting in the contemporary fight against racism, saying that ‘il ne sert à rien de répéter les vieilles rengaines de l’anti-racisme’.500 Despite this open engagement with Taguieff’s ideas from members of anti-racist groups, the development of Taguieff’s critique of contemporary anti-racism could be seen in a speech he gave to the LICRA’s annual conference in 1989. Far from strengthening the contemporary struggle against racism, Taguieff argued that anti-racist memory culture had in fact been a hindrance. French anti-racist memory culture had, he argued, ‘frozen’ the vocabulary of anti-racism for decades.501 The fact that this argument was made in the publication and, the following month, at the annual conference of an anti-racist organisation which was, arguably, the embodiment of this tradition of ‘commemorative anti-racism’ highlighted its openness to constructive criticism.

Taguieff’s writings contributed to a developing literature of anti-racist critique in France.502 As stated earlier, Taguieff does not quite fit into the ‘anti-anti-racist’ category. However, Paul Yonnet, whose controversial book Voyage

497 Benabdessadok, ‘Anti-racisme’, Différences, p. 10. 498 Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘Reflexion: Repenser le racisme et l’anti-racisme’, Le Droit de Vivre (November 1988), p. 2. 499 Taguieff, ‘Reflexion’, Le Droit de Vivre, p. 2.500 ‘It is useless to repeat the old anti-racist tunes’: Herbert Lamm, ‘Repenser le racisme’, Le Droit de Vivre (January-February 1989), p. 18.501 Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘Réagir face au racisme culturel’, Le Droit de Vivre (February 1989), p. 10. 502 Wieviorka, ‘Is it so difficult to be an anti-racist?’, in Werbner and Modood (eds.), Debating Cultural Hybridity, p. 140.

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au centre du malaise français: L’antiracisme et le roman national was published in 1993, is a rather neater fit. Voyage au centre du malaise français explored the apparent paradox that lay at the heart of anti-racism in the 1980s. This paradox lay in the desire of a new generation of anti-racists – as epitomised by SOS Racisme - to challenge racism while eroding, as Yonnet saw it, the French republican tradition of assimilation. Yonnet was particularly pessimistic about the extent to which the recognition and celebration of ‘difference’ by the ‘neo-anti-racists’ enriched society.503 Sharing Taguieff’s fear of ‘communautarisme’, Yonnet argued that the recognition of a multiplicity of identities (la droit à la différence) threatened to prise open new fractures in French society fundamentally damaging social and cultural cohesion. One of the consequences of anti-racist activism in the 1980s, as led by SOS Racisme, was to revive the concept of ‘race’. In embracing ethnic and cultural difference, the ‘neo-anti-racists’ were, according to Yonnet, only stoking the flames of racism.504 For Yonnet, the anti-racism of SOS Racisme rested upon a ‘mythe social et politique’, representing a continuity between the utopian and egalitarian ideals of the ’68 generation and the new generation of anti-racist activists that emerged in the early-to-mid 1980s.505 It is notable that despite Yonnet’s attempt to analyse contemporary anti-racism within a broader historical context (he examines the roles played by the legacy of May 1968, Vichy and the fractious interwar period in the development of anti-racist thought and practice) he has remarkably little to say about the older anti-racist organisations, such as the MRAP and the LICRA. His focus is principally on the transmission of radical ideological principles and memories of May 1968 through the diverse and youthful leaders of the new generation of anti-racist activism.506 While Voyage au centre du malaise français does not deal extensively with the intertwined roles of history and memory in shaping the intellectual landscape of anti-racism, Yonnet nevertheless expresses his concern with the influence of historical memories (particularly of Vichy) in the reappraisals of anti-racist thinking on la droit à la différence and the acknowledgement of different ethnic identities in France.

503 Paul Yonnet, Voyage au centre du malaise français: L’antiracisme et le roman national (Paris, 1993), p. 15.504 Emmanuel Jovelin, ‘Ambiguites de l’antiracisme: Retour sur quelques associations militants’, in Le Sociographe, No. 34 (2011), p. 28.505 Yonnet, Voyage au centre du malaise français, p. 303. 506 Ibid, p. 303.

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While Taguieff’s targeting of ‘commemorative anti-racism’ and Yonnet’s concerns over the potential consequences of anti-racism’s embrace of la droit à la différence revolved (albeit unevenly) around memories of the Holocaust and Second World War, critics of anti-racism in Britain (who, unlike Taguieff, were not quite as interested in reforming anti-racism) were no less animated by questions of historical memory. In the same year as Taguieff wrote in Le Droit de Vivre calling for a ‘rethink’ of racism and anti-racism, Russell Lewis, a former leader writer for the Daily Mail and Conservative parliamentary candidate, released a book entitled Anti-Racism: A Mania Exposed. In this polemic against anti-racism, Lewis wrote that while racism was ‘a serious social disease’, anti-racism, ‘the recommended cure…can be as fatal’.507 Lewis sought to present anti-racists and anti-racist initiatives – such as those introduced by local councils and the GLC earlier in the decade – as wrong-headed and more likely to inflame racism than eradicate it. In a similar vein to Yonnet, the idea that by drawing attention to the issue of racism would serve only to inflame racism was central to Lewis’ thesis.

Lewis was particularly alert to the role played by history and memory in mobilising activists to action. He identified ‘three potent, even traumatic experiences’ from the past which, he argued, contributed to the contemporary ‘vehemence’ of anti-racists.508 These were the memories of the Second World War, the creation and disintegration of the British Empire and, lastly, post-war and post-colonial immigration. Lewis argued that the second component – the memory of Britain’s empire – was primarily responsible for providing the ‘emotional fuel’ of anti-racism as well as instilling ‘guilt’ over Britain’s imperial past.509 He later argued that anti-racist campaigns and movements had only been sustained by the memory of Britain’s imperial past and its ‘traumatic episodes. It is clear from Lewis’ focus on the question of guilt that he is referring primarily to white anti-racist activists and not self-organising black groups. Indeed, very little mention is made throughout the polemic of the actual identities of anti-racist activists, particularly those from post-colonial communities. Even less is said about how one’s lived experience of colonialism – or those of one’s parents, grandparents or other relatives – might contribute to colonial memory taking on a prominent role within anti-racist thought and practice. 507 Russell Lewis, Anti-Racism: A Mania Exposed (London, 1988), p. 1. 508 Ibid., p. 17.509 Ibid., p. 22.

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Lewis was nevertheless aware of the moral and historical baggage that came with racism. As he put it,

the word ‘racism’ arouses strong feelings because it evokes thoughts of Hitler, the British Empire and immigration. A combination of horror and misplaced sense of guilt shaped the liberal approach to racial issues in the post-war period.510

Lewis’s statement that any kind of guilt or discomfort about Britain’s past was ‘misplaced’ and that Britain’s immigration policies in the post-war period were ‘liberal’ betrays an unwillingness to seriously engage with the real-life consequences Britain’s past had for its post-colonial present. It also exposed the tendency of thinkers of the New Right and prominent anti-anti-racists to see Britain’s imperial past through rose-tinted lens. That racism and over-excessive guilt about Britain’s imperial past were both viewed as little more than personal moral failings reveals an over-simplified understanding of the historical and social conditions and dynamics of racism, as well as of the profound role of the imperial past and ‘race-thinking’ in producing contemporary racism.

The contested legacies of the British Empire also raised bigger questions about the past, framed in terms of the cultural inheritance of the West. Scruton argued that ‘[O]ur cultural legacy is received with misgiving, by people who have turned against it and wish to destroy its power’: Britain’s cultural and historical legacies, such as empire, were to be a source of pride, not shame.511 Scruton’s reference to ‘our’ cultural legacy and inheritance is an important one. Anti-racists were depicted as being engaged in a project to denigrate and distort the national past based on an interpretation which amplified all that which was negative, exclusive and discriminatory about Britain and Europe’s history. This conception of the past had important implications for the way in which anti-anti-racists engaged with anti-racism. History became a battleground. Conservative and liberal critics of anti-racism saw themselves as the heirs to and guardians of tradition, ancient institutions, manners as well as a homogenous and immutable past. The memory of empire was near sacrosanct and the ostensible denigration of its legacy by radical historians, left-wing activists and anti-racists was seen as an attack on Britishness itself and fed off, as Stuart Hall astutely put it, on ‘the disappointed hopes of the present and the

510 Ibid., p. 149. 511 Scruton, ‘Editorial’, The Salisbury Review (December 1987), p.2.

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deep and unrequited traces of the past.512 It is therefore no surprise that one of the primary concerns of The Salisbury Review and its contributors was to protect the reputation of Britain’s imperial past as one of benevolence, innovation and improvement. This was an attempt to recover Britain’s history from the uncertainty and doubts of the present. The loss of Britain’s empire and its struggle to find a new role on the world stage – to paraphrase the former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s famous and far-reaching words – determined the anxieties and uncertainties latent in British debates over identity and status for the duration of the second-half of the twentieth century. Anti-racism was seen as little more than an exercise in retroactive self-flagellation and was a tactic used to dismiss the legitimacy of anti-racists’ concerns and to delegitimise their right to challenge the national narrative. By presenting anti-racists as navel-gazing and disloyal to the nation, anti-anti-racists undermined their right to present an alternative narrative of Britain and Europe’s colonial past. In loudly challenging the national narrative of the past, anti-racists found themselves classed as one of the many manifestations of ‘the enemy within’ – a Powellite theme which Thatcher would make her own.513

‘Dark Continent’: European History and the Spectre of Disorder

Another strategy of anti-anti-racists was to accuse anti-racists of being the real racists and imperialists.514 Honeyford complained that to be on the political right meant ‘starting with the burden of imputed guilt’ and that ‘the shadows of fascism, the holocaust [sic] and apartheid fall across all conservatives who attempt to debate ethnicity.’515 One of the primary methods of discrediting the activist work of anti-racists was to make unflattering historical comparisons. These were particularly resonant in the context of the Cold War. Scruton, for instance, accused anti-racists of being enthusiastic convenors of ‘the intellectual show trial’ against their conservative and liberal detractors. Adopting the Soviet show trial as a metaphor, the accused

512 Stuart Hall, ‘The empire strikes back’, in Davison, Featherston, Rustin and Schwarz (eds.), Selected Political Writings (London, 2017), p. 205. 513 Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to the 1922 Committee (“the enemy within”), 19 July 1984’, Margaret Thatcher Foundation: https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105563 [Last accessed: 27/03/2019]. See also, Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-colonial Britain, p. 77

514 Bonnett, Radicalism, Anti-Racism and Representation, p. 50515 Ray Honeyford, ‘Book Review’, The Salisbury Review (January 1987), p. 64.

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is brought before the judges as a member of the great ‘New Right’ conspiracy, centred in The Salisbury Review. The court, a self-appointed bench of left-wing intellectuals, assembled in some authoritative academic venue, accuses the victims of the Great Crime, and proceeds at once to a verdict of guilty. The Great Crime goes by various names – ‘nationalism’, ‘chauvinism’, ‘fascism’, ‘Nazism’ and (most popular of all) ‘racism’. The racism in question is ‘objective racism’ – the kind that needs no guilty mind on the part of the criminal.516

The language and imagery used by Scruton is redolent of anti-communist literature from the mid-twentieth century, calling to mind Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) and Milan Kundera’s The Joke (1969). By comparing anti-racists - overwhelmingly of the political left and, in the eyes of their critics, of the same political family as Stalinism and Soviet Communism – to the Soviet bureaucrats and ideologues involved in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and 1940s, Scruton sought to discredit and undermine the integrity of their cause. Scruton often developed the idea that anti-racism was prone to totalitarianism. In an article for The Times he argued that ‘the modern totalitarian who sees the Nazi not as his fellow-in-delusion but as his quintessential foe has built an ideology from “anti-racism”’.517 Similar language was used by David Dale who condemned ‘anti-racist totalitarianism’ and, tellingly, paraphrased the final lines of George Orwell’s Animal Farm: ‘the creatures outside looked from anti-racist to racist, and from racist to anti-racist, and from anti-racist to racist again; but already it was impossible to say which was which’.518 In harnessing the anti-totalitarian literature of George Orwell against anti-racists, Dale sought to portray them as oppressive and authoritarian proponents of groupthink: rendering certain things unsayable and some thoughts unthinkable.519 If, as Lentin has argued, there was a ‘teleology of racism’, it would seem that – in the pages of The Salisbury Review at least – that there was also a ‘teleology of anti-racism’ which offered an alternative narrative. This suggested that anti-racism, while motivated by good intentions, inevitably led to increased thought-policing, cultural relativism and, ultimately, a Soviet-style society of groupthink and self-censorship.

516 Roger Scruton (ed.), Conservative Thoughts, pp. 8-9.517 Roger Scruton, ‘The paths blocked by anti-racists’, The Times (16 April 1985), p. 14. 518 David Dale, ‘The New Ideology of Race’, The Salisbury Review (October 1985), p. 22.519 Bonnett, Radicalism, Anti-Racism and Representation, p. 50.

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Of course, drawing comparisons between anti-racists in 1980s Britain and the NKVD of Stalin’s Soviet Union – while lacking in historical accuracy and sensitivity - seriously overstated the significance of anti-racists and anti-racism in British public life at a time when Thatcherism reigned supreme. It also dismissed the very real concerns with which anti-racists were dealing. The fear directed towards anti-racists is suggestive of just how concerned their conservative critics were in their ability to affect the mood of national public culture in favour of the political left. The tension between anti-racists and anti-anti-racists was representative of the tension between a Thatcherite hegemony from above and a strong left-wing political culture in Britain’s urban centres. Deploying imagery associated with particular episodes of twentieth-century European history, Scruton implied that anti-racists and the British left carried the seeds for potential disorder. Indeed, Scruton’s highly personal experience of one of the defining historical moments of national and political disorder in post-war Europe set the Salisbury Review’s founding editor on the path to conservatism. In the 1980s, memories of the upheaval of 1968 remained a powerful force in shaping the political universes of anti-racists and anti-anti-racists alike. Scruton was in Paris during the May events of 1968. Rather than being swept up in the youthful wave of revolutionary fervour, however, he had looked upon the riotous students with contempt. Scruton has frequently recounted his experience of witnessing les événements of May 1968 as the moment of his conversion to conservatism.520 The intellectual and philosophical currents which underpinned the activity of ‘the ’68 years’ became a significant source of enquiry for Scruton throughout his subsequent career. Thinkers of the New Left (1985), published several years after the launch of The Salisbury Review, subjected prominent French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault to significant scrutiny. Scruton took a dim view of French intellectual aspirations, seeing its ‘theoretical absolutism’ as thoroughly destructive.521 Thinkers of the New Left was a conservative critique which sought to dismantle the intellectual architecture of contemporary left-wing thought. Despite his concern that left-wing political culture was compromising the integrity of Britain’s traditions, institutions and national identity, Scruton was nevertheless convinced that it was France where, by comparison, ‘the outlook of the left entered more firmly into the national culture…the motherland

520 On this subject see Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (London, 2005), pp. 33-35. 521 Scruton, Thinkers of the New Left, p. 32.

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of revolution’.522 In the 1970s and 1980s, Scruton regarded left-wingers and post-’68 activists as historically illiterate and ‘severed by their ignorance from the history and culture of their ancestors’.523 The potential influence of radical French politics on the political left in Britain was a cause for concern. Reflecting anxieties about the potentially corruptive influence of French political culture on left-wing British minds, Scruton sought to dismantle the abstract claims, such as equality, made by French intellectuals which partially laid the ideological foundations for anti-racist thought and practice.

Conclusion

The criticisms levelled against anti-racism over the course of the 1980s and early 1990s on both sides of the Channel were simultaneously different in approach and yet reflected similar anxieties about the health of British and French national identity. In Britain, anti-anti-racism was articulated in terms of contested interpretations of Britain’s imperial past and through a discourse in which culture displaced ‘race’ as the prism through which changing demographic realities in post-colonial Britain were interpreted. In France, despite a brief parenthesis in which ‘le droit à la différence’ became a prominent theme in the nation’s political and cultural vocabulary, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw a revival of (neo)republicanism and a turn away from the dangerous ‘communautarisme’ that anti-racists were believed to be promoting.524

The debate between anti-racists and their critics was far more heated in Britain than in France. The public ridicule to which the ‘anti-racist lobby’ was subjected by the tabloids and right-wing broadsheet newspapers had been filtered from the intellectual critiques launched against anti-racism in the Salisbury Review. In certain respects, the heated discourse between anti-racists and their detractors highlighted a sense of crisis. These were crises rooted in anxieties over the development of increasingly diverse, post-colonial and post-industrial societies. Despite the very different political and cultural contexts in which critiques of anti-racism were launched, there was nevertheless a shared concern over what was thought to be anti-racism’s promotion of ethnic 522 Roger Scruton, Thinkers of the New Left (Essex, 1985), p. 32.523 Ibid., p. 7. 524 See Flood, ‘National republican politics, intellectuals and the case of Pierre-André Taguieff’, in Modern and Contemporary France, 12:3 (2004), pp. 353-370.

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difference (often presented in highly reductive terms as ‘white majority vs. black minority’). The idea that anti-racists were simply stoking tensions and/or separatism along ethnic and racial lines posed a threat to the theoretical unity and indivisibility of the French Republic and to the myth of stability and ostensibly tolerant values of the United Kingdom. The prevalence of memory in the discourse between anti-racists and their detractors was more pronounced in Britain than in France. However, as we have seen, French critics of anti-racism such as Taguieff expressed their concern over the limits imposed by ‘commemorative anti-racism’.525 In both cases, the tensions that existed between anti-racists and their detractors had a profoundly historicist dimension and requires further research. This would provide contemporary historians with a much more nuanced understanding of the heated debates that took place and how historical memory featured within these. It is, however, the case that the frames of reference of these debates were overwhelmingly national. By the turn of the 1980s and 1990s however, developments across Europe transformed the terms of anti-racist engagement.

Chapter Four

The Turn to Europe: Between Memory and History

‘If we are to be effective as anti-racists – at the end of the twentieth century, after the collapse of ‘Communism’, when a powerful and dominant West can move unchecked throughout the world – we need not only to build our

525 Taguieff, ‘Reflexion: Repenser le racisme et l’anti-racisme’, Le Droit de Vivre (November 1988), p. 2.

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movements against racism here, but to relate to the anti-imperialist forces in the Third World. More than ever, the anti-racist struggle cannot be separated from the anti-imperialist struggle.’526

Campaign against Racism and Fascism (CARF)

‘Le néo-nazisme, l’antisémitisme refont surface un peu partout. L’action antiraciste, par la force des choses, tend à s’organiser à l’échelle européenne…La construction européenne est une réalité, nous devons en tenir compte…rien de ce qui arrive quelque part n'est extérieur à notre horizon de militants contre le racisme et pour l'amitié entre les peuples.’527

MRAP

IntroductionAt the dawn of the 1990s, anti-racist memory and activism began to operate on a larger, transnational and European scale. The collapse of communism, the renewed push towards European integration, the reappearance of ethnic cleansing in Europe during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s and the ostensible forward march of globalisation all contributed in various and complex ways to the forging of stronger cross-border anti-racist networks. This moment of anti-racist expansion helped further develop and deepen understandings of racism as part of a shared European heritage, as opposed to seeing racism as a problem peculiar to their own national histories and confined to their borders.528

This ‘European turn’ of the early 1990s encouraged anti-racists in Britain and France to ‘zoom out’ and reassert traditional commitments of solidarity with fellow anti-racists across a Europe newly shorn (if not entirely) of the rigid ideological and geographical divisions of the past half-century.

The European turn was far from straightforward and met with differing levels of success and enthusiasm. Some anti-racists, especially those closely aligned to the far-left, were sceptical if not outright hostile to the renewed push for integration. The CARF and Searchlight, for instance, expressed deep unease over the potential consequences of the harmonisation of European immigration policy.529 Despite concerns about the creation of a ‘Fortress Europe’ – an appendage, as some would argue, to Europe’s colonial past – many anti-racists 526 ‘Editorial’, CARF (September/October 1992), p.2. 527 ‘Neo-Nazism and antisemitism are resurfacing everywhere. Anti-racist action, by necessity, must be organised on a European scale. We must take into account, the construction of Europe is a reality…Nothing is outside out our horizon of activists against racism and for friendship between peoples’: ‘L’anti-racisme et l’Europe en 1993’, Différences (January 1993), pp. 8-9. 528 Buettner, Europe after Empire, p. 429.529 See ‘Harmonising Racism’, CARF (May/June 1992).

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nevertheless remained enthusiastic about the opportunities presented by integration for establishing stronger transnational and grassroots connections with fellow European anti-racists. This chapter will argue that anti-racist attitudes to Europe varied at the organisational level of the European Union (EU) and the activism ‘from below’ of anti-racists across borders. Did this, then, encourage anti-racists to think on a broader European scale about their activism and, if so, more than the preceding decade? The very issue of Europe and integration elicited a variety of responses from anti-racist activists and organisations. Such responses were intimately entwined with the diverse ideological commitments of individual anti-racists: commitments which were tested or strained as a result of the dramatic shifts of the geopolitical tectonic plates at the beginning of the 1990s. However, responses to the renewed push for European integration were also influenced by anti-racist readings of the past.

It would be wrong to suggest that there had been a lack of interest in European racism and anti-racism or transnational co-operation among anti-racists before this point. National anti-racist organisations in Britain and France boasted ‘entangled histories’ well before and during the 1980s.530 As has already been seen, Searchlight and the CARF sent representatives such as Catherine Lloyd to the MRAP’s annual congresses in the early 1980s.531 In October 1987, Albert Lévy had represented the MRAP at a conference in Amsterdam devoted to the topic of ‘New forms of Racism in Europe’ at which representatives of British, French and German activist groups had also been present to discuss European approaches to anti-racism.532 The following year, Searchlight magazine sent delegates to an Anti-Fascist European conference in Stockholm in order to forge closer ties with their European counterparts.533 Despite concerns about a lack of ‘real will to combat racism in Europe’, there was nevertheless a significant ‘dimension européenne’ to anti-racist activism in the 1980s.534 At times when there appeared to be limited engagement with their European counterparts, there was nevertheless a natural tendency to think in European terms before the 1990s. Yet this ‘European dimension’ was far less

530 Daniel A. Gordon, ‘French and British Anti-Racists since the 1960s: A rendez-vous manqué?’, in Journal of Contemporary History, 50:3 (2015), p. 611.531 ‘Solidaires du MRAP’, Droit et Liberté (May-June 1982), p. 13. 532 ‘Le MRAP, l’Europe, Le Monde’, Différences (April 1988), p. 33.533 ‘Anti-Fascist European Conference’, Searchlight, (March 1988), p. 15.534 Editorial’, Searchlight (January 1981), p. 2: and, Jean-Pierre Bloch, ‘1927-1987: 60e anniversaire de la LICRA’, Le Droit de Vivre (November-December 1987), p. 2.

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pronounced than it would be in the early 1990s. The 1980s found British and French anti-racism looking largely inwards and focusing on domestic concerns. In Britain, the challenge of Thatcherism and the assault on anti-racism in local authorities and education by conservative intellectuals, politicians and the tabloid media were the priorities of anti-racism. The failure to build and sustain a national anti-racist movement and the lack of political engagement with the continuing reality of racism in Britain’s streets and institutions were key concerns. In France, anti-racists were largely preoccupied with the rise of the Front National, intermittent racist and antisemitic terrorism and the emergence of youthful post-colonial anti-racist protest. Such national political and anti-racist developments limited the scope for ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ anti-racism on a European scale.

The ‘opening up’ of Europe in geopolitical, cultural and economic terms was essential to British and French reappraisals of Europe’s broader significance to the anti-racist struggle. The final decade of the twentieth century was a ‘crucial turning point’ in the development of European attitudes and approaches towards immigration and for the continued consolidation of ethnic minority communities across Europe.535 The end of the Cold War, the collapse of communism and the rapid cultural influence of the idea that history had come to a definitive end shook the kaleidoscope.536 The 1990s became the decade of the refugee. In the Cold War’s wake came what Stefano Fella and Carlo Ruzza have characterised as the ‘third wave’ of immigration which resulted in pressure for European-wide co-ordination of immigration and asylum policies.537 The intensification of what Pierre Nora had described shortly before the revolutions of 1989 as the ‘acceleration of history’538 and the new challenges of the 1990s – European integration, new waves of immigration and globalisation – elicited different responses and renewed priorities for anti-racists in Britain and France. For instance, as the institutional framework of the European Economic Community (EEC) – soon to be the European Union (EU) – began to take more definitive shape at the beginning of the decade, the CARF collective stressed the need for anti-racists across Europe to ‘come together to discuss the

535 Stephen Castles, ‘Immigration and Asylum: Challenges to European Identities and Citizenship’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (Oxford, 2012), p. 202. 536 See Vladimir Tismaneanu, ‘The Revolutions of 1989: Causes, Meanings, Consequences’ in Contemporary European History, 18:3 (2009),537 Fella and Ruzza (eds.), Anti-Racist Movements in the EU, pp. 5-6. 538 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History; Les Lieux des Mémoires’ in Representations, No. 26 (Spring 1989), p. 7.

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contours of the new European state’.539 The CARF also expressed concerns over ‘the racism pervasive in Europe’s institutions’.540 This was a moment in which space for the creation of an anti-racist ‘European civil society’ had ostensibly opened up; a rebuke to the intra- and extra-European racism which had underscored some of the most important events and developments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.541 The struggle against racism was increasingly recognised as one that had to operate beyond the scale of the individual nation-state. This was a moment of expansion for the outlooks and concerns of anti-racists whose principles of solidarity and internationalism began to be practiced with a renewed enthusiasm.

The shared post-war and post-colonial realities of Western Europe were intimately entwined.542 Racism towards newcomers to the former metropole was not simply a British or French problem, but a phenomenon common to all post-imperial nations. The LICRA had already expressed its concern – as a result of the Front National’s performance in the 1984 elections to the European parliament in which it won ten seats – with what it saw as the growing ‘Europeanisation’ of racism, particularly through far-right networks.543 Indeed, one commentator called for a ‘euro-baromètre’ of racism and a common European anti-racist front.544 That racism was being posited as a subject for monitoring through the Eurobarometer which, since 1974, had gauged European citizens’ views of the EEC, the quality of its social provisions and initiatives suggests the growing tendency among activists to think about racism as an issue demanding cross-border attention. The desire to establish transnational anti-racist networks was, in one respect, a response to the attempts of the far-right to forge connections across Europe. It was, in another, the response of a broader ‘countermovement’ to the already existing challenge of racism in and across European states.545

539 ‘Editorial’, CARF (January/February 1993), p.2. 540 ‘Editorial’, CARF (September/October 1992), p. 2. 541 Cathie Lloyd, ‘Anti-racism, social movements and civil society’ in Floya Anthias and Cathie Lloyd, Rethinking Anti-racisms: From Theory to Practice (London, 2002), pp. 71-72.542 Buettner, Europe after Empire, p. 10. 543 Gérard Fellous, ‘L’Extrême-Droite Européene tente de creer un front commun’, Le Droit de Vivre (February 1985), p. 11.544 Martine Gozlan, ‘Europe de l’anti-racisme: Élaboration d’une nouvelle politique européene’, Le Droit de Vivre (October/November 1985), p. 4.545 Fella and Ruzza, ‘Anti-Racist Movements in the European Union: Between National Specificity and Europeanisation’, in Fella and Ruzza (eds.), Anti-Racist Movements in the EU (Basingstoke, 2013), p. 16.

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The 1990s thus saw a detectable shift in British and French anti-racist attitudes towards Europe as an idea, a political and economic entity as well as an opportunity for greater cross-border and transnational engagement with fellow anti-racists outside Britain and France. The context of the revolutions of 1989 was central to this. Throughout the 1980s and well before, issues relating to the Cold War had been of concern to anti-racists in Britain and France. For the LICRA, the human rights abuses committed against Jews living in the Soviet Union had been a frequent rallying point in its activism against antisemitism.546 In Britain, Searchlight magazine warned of the rise of far-right and neo-Nazi activity in Eastern Europe before and after the events of 1989 sparking fears of a resurrection of fascism in Europe after its defeat nearly half a century earlier.547 Having defined the geopolitical landscape and its attendant concerns since the late 1940s, the end of the Cold War transformed the political cultures, concerns and language of Europe, east and west allowing for what one scholar has described as a ‘rediscovery of democratic participation and civic activism’ in the former eastern bloc.548 In western Europe there was not so much a ‘rediscovery’ as there was a revitalisation of social movements and the politics of solidarity in the wake of the transformative events in the east.549

This chapter will explore the extent to which the collapse of communism and integration breathed new life into British and French anti-racist activism. While the connections between the revolutions of 1989 and the activities of anti-racists in two Western European countries might not appear immediately obvious, events in eastern Europe nevertheless had significant implications for the redirection of anti-racist concerns towards a European outlook and a renewal of transnational activism. This chapter will also interrogate the nature of the anti-racist turn to Europe during the period between 1988 and the middle of the 1990s. How did anti-racists north and south of the Channel understand and conceive of Europe as both idea and place? Why did some activists see this moment as an opportunity for a renewal of anti-racism?

546 See Georges Nicod, ‘1982, année internationale de solidarité en faveur des Juifs et des dissidents soviétiques’, Le Droit de Vivre (February 1982), p. 11. See also, ‘Manifestations pour les Juifs de l’URSS’, Le Droit de Vivre (June/July 1985), p. 15. 547 For examples of Searchlight’s concern about renewed far-right mobilisation in eastern Europe see Searchlight, (September 1988), ‘Growing Racism threatens Europe, Searchlight (July 1990), p. 13 andSearchlight, (October 1991).548 Vladimir Tismaneanu, ‘The Revolutions of 1989: Causes, Meanings, Consequences’ in Contemporary European History, 18:3 (2009), p. 283. 549 For an exploration of how the politics of solidarity can and has been ‘racialised’ see Juliet Hooker, Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford, 2009).

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Finally, this chapter will also examine whether British and French anti-racism and their respective memory cultures showed indications of undergoing a ‘Europeanisation’ during this period, opening up new cross-border networks and channels of communication. The years between 1988 and 1995 marked half a century since the Second World War and was punctuated by significant commemorations at both a European and national level. This memorial context is important to understanding the incorporation of Holocaust memory in particular into the national narrative of the past and its elevation, in France and to a lesser extent Britain, to a nationally recognised memory. As Holocaust memory became increasingly nationalised and Europeanised, colonial memory began to surface unevenly in Britain and France’s national awareness. The following chapter will explore in greater detail whether the 1990s saw a convergence of Holocaust and colonial memory in antiracist thought and activism or whether tensions between the two memory cultures complicated the creation of a multidirectional anti-racist memory or indeed if this process was more successful in France than in Britain.550

The 1990s was a crucial decade for the consolidation and institutionalisation of Holocaust memory in Western Europe. In contrast, memories of European colonialism largely remained beneath the surface of public awareness though colonial memory was stirring in anti-racist circles.551 This chapter will also establish how memories of Europe’s twentieth century experience filtered into anti-racist reflections, articulating themselves in the decade’s transformed political and cultural climate. For as long as the scourge of racism existed inside Europe and an increasingly globalised world, there was no ‘end of history’ for European anti-racists.

The End of the Cold War: The Return of History? In the January 1990 edition of Différences, Jacques Chevassus commented on events ‘East and West’. He argued that the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War was a significant moment for Europe and for anti-racists.

550 See Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory (Stanford, 2009). 551 See, in the case of Holocaust memory, Pakier and Strath, A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (New York, 2010), Dan Stone, History, Memory and Mass Atrocity: Essays on the Holocaust and Genocide (London, 2006) and Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust (Stanford, 2004). For colonial memory see Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror and Memory (Oxford, 2006) and Elizabeth Buettner, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society and Culture (Cambridge, 2016).

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Chevassus saw in the present moment an opportunity for a transformation.552 Reflecting on developments in eastern Europe, Chevassus expressed his hope that this heralded a renewed democracy and the free self-determination of peoples. He also anticipated the discovery of a common belonging to a historical and cultural Europe.553 It was a moment of cautious optimism and Chevassus’ words echoed those of liberal commentators on the end of the Cold War, particularly in the Anglophone world.

The overwhelmingly positive lens through which the legacy of the 1989 revolutions have been seen and continue to be seen today sometimes obscure the more complex responses of individuals, commentators and other groups to the events at the time. The historical reality that the collapse of communism had been largely unforeseen in spite of the glaring economic, political and ethical decay of the Soviet Union has received some significant attention.554 Yet, it is clear that for British and French anti-racist activists, the speed with which the 1989 revolutions rolled out across east-central Europe was somewhat bewildering, catching them off-guard and ambivalent in their immediate responses.

Despite the positive responses of some anti-racists to the events of 1989-1991 (which will be explored in further detail below) anxiety over the rise of racism in Europe – whatever its manifestation: neo-nazism, anti-immigrant sentiment or the institutional racism of national governments – was not simply a reaction to contemporary events and transformations, but was deeply rooted in anti-racist understandings of Europe’s recent past. Liz Fekete, writing in Race & Class, was particularly alert to this historical context, interpreting the increase in nationalism and racism across eastern and western European countries in terms of ‘the specific history of racism, fascism and colonialism in each’.555 Unlike Searchlight and CARF which consistently addressed the question of European integration, Race & Class devoted only one issue to the subject. This was not due to a lack of interest. During this period, the primary focus of Race & Class was on global, post-colonial issues which sought to avoid a Euro-centric gaze on issues pertaining to racism and anti-racism. In January

552 Jacques Chevassus, ‘Panorama: Est-Ouest’, Différences (January 1990), p. 1. 553 Ibid., p. 1. 554 Ian Kershaw, Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 (London, 2019), p. 334. See also, Timothy Garton Ash, History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (New York, 2001); Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1998). 555 Liz Fekete, ‘Europe for the Europeans: East End for the East Enders’, Race & Class (July 1990), p. 67.

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1991 Race & Class devoted separate articles devoted to national variants of racism from Spain to Sweden, Britain to Holland. In the editorial, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, was notably hostile towards the push for European integration. For Sivanandan, ‘the emergence of an institutionalised racism on a pan-European basis, fomenting and fomented by popular racism’ portended ‘the drift towards an authoritarian European state’.556 An article by the human rights lawyer and former Vice-Chair of the Institute of Race Relations, Frances Webber, explored the transition from ‘ethno-centrism to Euro-racism’ while another report warned of the coming of an authoritarian and racist European super-state.557 The legacies of the old Europe hung heavy over the new Europe. In the case of Holocaust and Second World War memory, this can be seen in the outright hostility in some anti-racist circles towards the prospect of German reunification.

Throughout 1990, Searchlight took a rather cautious approach in its assessment of the events of 1989 seeing it as less of an opportunity but as potentially ominous of a return to the racism and fascism of interwar Europe.558 This was amply demonstrated by the front cover of the January 1990 issue which depicted the European continent over which was superimposed an oversized swastika. The headline read, ‘1990; A Spectre Haunting Europe – East and West’.559 The obvious allusion to the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto (1848) captured a complex yet historically rooted response to the rapidly shifting political sands. If that spectre was no longer communism, long discredited and now in the process of being dismantled, what was to take its place? For Searchlight, the swastika represented not so much the end of history, but its ominous return. Searchlight refused to see these major geopolitical transformations through anything other than the lens of anti-fascism and anti-racism. Later that year, in October, another Searchlight headline asked if the swift reunification of Germany heralded ‘Democracy or a Fourth Reich?’.560 The unease of Searchlight and its editorial team towards a newly unified Germany was clear.

556 A. Sivanandan, ‘Editorial’, Race & Class, Vo. 32:3 (January 1991), p. v.557 See Frances Webber, ‘From ethnocentrism to Euro-racism’, Race & Class, Vol. 32:3 (January 1991), pp. 11-17: Tony Bunyan, ‘Towards an authoritarian European state’, Race & Class, 32:3 (January 1991), pp. 19-27.558 Searchlight, (January 1990).559 Ibid., p.1.560 Searchlight (October 1990), p. 1.

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This was one of the rare occasions on which Searchlight magazine found itself in agreement with Margaret Thatcher who had made clear her own opposition to the reunification of Germany.561 Thatcher’s position - shared by much of her political generation – was profoundly shaped by the popular British memory of the Second World War. The war had been fought to end German power and its domination of Europe. To Thatcher and like-minded peers, proposals for Germany’s unification nearly half a century later threatened to restore German dominance and destabilise the post-war order as it had existed.562 Thatcher reflected the self-congratulatory tone of British popular memories of the Second World War.563 Indeed, whatever the authenticity of Thatcher’s outburst in which she is reputed to have said ‘we beat the Germans twice, and now they’re back’, its reference to the two world wars is revealing.564

While Searchlight presented this concern in a rather more dramatic manner, it shared with Thatcher a profound fear of the consequences of a unified Germany for the rest of Europe. Yet this was articulated in anti-racist and anti-fascist terms fearing the resurrection of German Nazism. The editorial of the January 1990 issue said that German reunification was ‘almost certain’ and that this could leave ‘Britain and Western Europe as third rate countries alongside a Germany that could rapidly become a world super power’.565 Alongside concerns over the geopolitical consequences of reunification, Searchlight warned its readers that the ‘rise of nationalism’ which had swept across east-central Europe should prompt concern ‘for the welfare of our black fellow Europeans’.566 It is notable that Searchlight did not share the same immediate concern for Jews living to the east of the old Iron Curtain as the LICRA did (to be explored in further detail below). There was also little acknowledgement of the fact that, unlike Western Europe, the level of immigration from outside Europe to the east had been, up until the 1990s, largely negligible.567 While this may reflect Searchlight’s ignorance of events to the east or its propensity to

561 Judt, Postwar, p. 639.562 Kershaw, Roller-Coaster,, p. 372. 563 Jill Stephenson, ‘Anniversaries, memory and the neighbours: The ‘German question’ in recent history’, in German Politics, 5:1 (1996), p. 54. 564 Carsten Volkery, ‘The Iron Lady’s Views on German Reunification: The Germans are Back”’, Spiegel Online (11 September 2009): http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/the-iron-lady-s-views-on-german-reunification-the-germans-are-back-a-648364.html [Last accessed: 27/02/2019].565 ‘Editorial’, Searchlight (January 1990), p. 2. 566 Ibid, p.2. 567 Andrew Geddes, The Politics of Migration and Immigration in Europe (London, 2003), p. 16.

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sensationalise its accounts of the end of communism, it nevertheless reveals again the unease with which the magazine followed contemporary events.

This response to post-1989 developments was, to a significant degree, profoundly shaped by Britain’s distinctive national memory of the Second World War. In its coverage of the collapse of communism and, in particular, the reunification of Germany, Searchlight revealed a tendency towards, at best, a perpetuation of lazy national stereotyping and, at worst, to Germanophobia.568 The interconnected legacies of fascism, the Third Reich and the Holocaust were mobilised in the fight against contemporary racism and were invoked during the early 1990s to warn against the potential danger that was seen in the re-establishment of a powerful and unified German nation at the heart of Europe nearly half a century later.

The concern and anxiety expressed by anti-racists over the reunification of Germany was, to an extent, justified by the increase in racist violence against refugees and immigrants as well as emboldened neo-Nazi activity in the first half of the 1990s.569 The far-right Republikaner made electoral gains in the European Parliament elections in 1989 and its leader Franz Schonhuber had been an active former member of the Nazi Party in the 1940s.570 Attacks on German refugee hostels by far-right and neo-nazi groups became commonplace in the early 1990s.571 Several days of rioting against asylum seeker hostels in Rostock in 1992 shocked anti-racists in Britain – leading Anjuli Gupta of CARF to refer to the perpetrators as ‘Hitler’s grandchildren’.572 The persistent references to Hitler and Nazism when referring to Germany both before and after reunification speak to both the dominance of the memory of the Second World War in the British national psyche. Fears of a revival of Nazism as well as a powerful and unified German state in the centre of a European Union and the consequences this may have for ethnic minorities and refugees were at the forefront of British anti-racist concerns. The alarm expressed by Searchlight

568 Graeme Atkinson, Searchlight’s European correspondent, criticised those whose anxieties about German reunification came from ‘an ignorant anti-German chauvinism’. He instead encouraged ‘cool evaluation of the dangers a new and powerful Germany might pose’. However, the imagery and tropes employed by the editorial team to reflect Searchlight’s concerns about reunification nevertheless rested upon problematic historical assumptions. Atkinson, ‘Germany United: Democracy or Danger’, Searchlight (October 1990), pp. 10-11. 569 Graeme Atkinson, ‘Germany: Nationalism, Nazism and Violence’, in Tore Björgo and Rob Witte (eds.), Racist Violence in Europe (Basingstoke, 1993), pp. 154. 570 Piero Ignazi, Extreme Right Parties in Europe (Oxford, 2003), p. 72. 571 Atkinson, ‘Germany: Nationalism, Nazism and Violence’, in Björgo and Witte (eds.), Racist Violence in Europe, pp. 162-163. 572 Anjuli Gupta, ‘Hitler’s Grandchildren’, CARF (September/October 1992), p. 2.

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over the reunification of Germany and the rise in neo-nazism across Europe lent a sense of urgency to the construction of transnational links with other anti-racist movements elsewhere.

In December 1991, Searchlight featured a letter from a German anti-racist who praised Searchlight for its ‘international solidarity’ and for strengthening the ‘anti-racist resistance in Germany on a material and also on a moral level’.573 Such correspondence suggested an increased focus in forging connections elsewhere, confirmed a year later when cooperation between anti-racists and anti-fascists in Britain and Germany appeared to be just as strong when Searchlight published a letter from a coalition of German activists who appealed for ‘solidarity against fascism, racism and anti-Semitism’.574

Fears that German reunification lent a certain inevitability to the return of Nazism were not, however, just the preserve of British activists. Nigel Copsey has shown how German anti-fascists, referring to Gottingen’s autonomous antifascists in particular, mobilised against German reunification using the slogan ‘‘Germany Never Again! (Nie Wieder Deutschland!)’.575 Using the language of memory activism which was frequently employed by Searchlight demonstrates its cross-border resonance and the Europeanisation of anti-fascist and anti-racist memory. In a special issue of Searchlight, anti-racists and anti-fascist activists were presented as ‘a guarantee of resistance to the tendency of history to repeat itself because they know that if it does so, it will not be as farce but as catastrophe for humanity.’576 This was an almost cyclical view of history upon which the return of the (racist, colonial, nazi) past was to be prevented by the activism and warnings of historically-conscious anti-racists. The reunification of Germany and the rise in racist and antisemitic attacks in the former east and elsewhere in Europe only confirmed for Searchlight and its contributors the necessity of vigilance and the role of historical memory in challenging the return of spectres of the recent past.

In comparison to the coverage given by Searchlight magazine to the events of the early 1990s, French anti-racist organisations demonstrated a more nuanced understanding of developments in east-central Europe between 1989 and 1991 and its political, cultural and economic consequences. For the LICRA,

573 ‘Letter from a German Youth’, Searchlight (December 1991), p. 11. 574 ‘Searchlight on the World’, Searchlight (December 1992), pp. 15-16. 575 Nigel Copsey, ‘Crossing Borders: Anti-Fascist Action (UK) and Transnational Anti-Fascist Militancy in the 1990s’, Contemporary European History, 25:4 (2016), p. 713. 576 Searchlight Special, Reunited Germany: The New Danger (in association with Anti-Fa Infoblatt), January 1995, p. 95.

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these events stirred apprehension and cautious optimism. Like Searchlight, Le Droit de Vivre initially responded to the sudden political transformations with some concern. Though where Searchlight specifically feared a German Nazism redivivus, the LICRA focused on the fate of Jews living in those areas of political upheaval. In January 1990, the headline of Le Droit de Vivre read ‘Antisémitisme en URSS et à l’Est: Les vieux demons de l’antisémitisme renaissent en Europe de l’Est’.577 The report on the unravelling of communist rule in the former satellite states of the Soviet Union focused less on the political developments which had transformed the state of post-war European geopolitics than it did on the consequences this may have for Jews living in the still-existing Soviet Union and east-central Europe. The MRAP was concerned by the reawakening of old nationalisms. However, in Différences, the threat of pogroms against Jews and Roma alike was only considered in passing.578 Concern over the plight of Jews living in the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence was not new to the LICRA. Throughout the 1980s, Jean Pierre-Bloch, the LICRA and the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France (CRIF) had been particularly vocal about the USSR’s human rights abuses and, in particular, its denial of the right to migration to Soviet Jews.579 However, in the wake of the revolutions of 1989, the LICRA feared that events in the east might give way to ‘a new antisemitic nightmare’,580 reflecting its concern over the speed with which nationalist sentiment appeared to be filling the vacuum left behind by communism. Not only did this analysis of events and the implications it carried reflect the anxiety of the LICRA for the safety and future of Eastern European Jews, it also affirmed the increasingly ‘European’ outlook the organisation was starting to assume.

As expressed in Différences, the MRAP was fairly optimistic about the opportunities that the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany brought to Europe. The editorial of Différences in October 1990 was

577 See Le Droit de Vivre (January 1990), p.1. 578 Chérifa Benabdessadok, ‘Le danger xénophobe à l’Est’, Différences (March 1990), pp. 4-5. 579 See, for instance, George Nicod, ‘1982, année internationale de solidarité en faveur des Juifs et des dissidents soviétiques’, Le Droit de Vivre (February 1982), p. 11; ‘Antisémitisme d’État dans les Pays de l’Est’, Le Droit de Vivre (April 1985), pp. 11-19; and, ‘Manifestation pour les juifs d’URSS’, Le Droit de Vivre (June/July 1985), p. 15. For academic literature on the experience of Jews living in the USSR in the 1980s see, for instance, Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The history of a national minority (Cambridge, 1988). See also Laurie P. Salitan, Politics and Nationality in Contemporary Soviet-Jewish Emigration, 1968-89 (Basingstoke, 1992). 580 Editorial, ‘Menaces de Pogroms’, Le Droit de Vivre (January 1990), p. 1.

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enthusiastic about the prospect of peace – ‘friendship between peoples is given a chance in Europe’ and the expansion of a Europe that no longer ‘stops at Bonn’.581 With the caveat that as long as political leaders ‘keep their word’ and avoid drifting towards nationalism and xenophobia, the editorial stated that Europe had a chance to finally seize peace after a ‘terrible war due to Nazi racism’ and forty-five years of Cold War.582 The following issue, however, reported on an international conference held in Berlin on the subject of the far-right across Europe and the MRAP expressed its alarm over the rise of the far-right; ‘a phenomenon common to many European countries’.583 Anti-racists in Britain and France alike expressed their concern at the growing flurry of far-right activity and racist violence in east-central Europe at the beginning of the 1990s. This fed into British and French anti-racist fears that the contemporary political climate across Europe might embolden the extreme right at home. Events at Carpentras in May 1990 appeared to confirm such anxieties.

The desecration of Jewish graves in Carpentras in south-eastern France on 10 May 1990 made national and international news.584 Over thirty graves were found damaged and a recently interred corpse had been dug out of its coffin and mutilated.585 The LICRA responded to this event with outrage: the headline of the June/July edition of Le Droit de Vivre read ‘Le choc de Carpentras’.586 The shock of this atrocity brought memories of the Holocaust into sharp focus, with the LICRA stating that antisemitism had shown ‘its ugliest face’ since the Second World War.587 The MRAP’s membre de la présidence, Albert Lévy, wrote in Différences that the desecration ‘transgress[ed] the norms of all human civilisation’ and that the perpetrators were the inheritors of Nazism.588 From the grassroots to the state-level, the Carpentras affair was, in one scholar’s words, a ‘trigger event’ aggressively jolting the Holocaust to the surface of national memory.589 The events in Carpentras also coincided with a 581 ‘Réunification Allemande: L’amitié des peuples’, Différences (October 1990), p. 1. 582 Ibid., p. 1. 583 ‘Dossier: L’extrême-droite Allemande’, Différences (November 1990), pp. 4-5. 584 ‘France reacts with horror at assault on dead Jews’, The Guardian, 11 May 1990: see also, Alan Riding, ‘Attacks on Jewish Graves Jolts France’, The New York Times, 12 May 1990. 585 Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (Stanford, 2004), p. 137. 586 ‘Le choc de Carpentras’, Le Droit de Vivre (June/July 1990), p. 1. 587 Editorial, ‘L’après Carpentras’, Le Droit de Vivre (June/July 1990), p. 1. 588 Albert Lévy, ‘Six heures contre l’extrême-droite: La sommeil de la raison’, Différences (May/June/July 1990), p. 8.589 Rob Witte, Racist Violence and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Britain, France and the Netherlands Abingdon, 1996), p. 104.

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series of fiftieth anniversaries of the Second World War, Occupation and the Holocaust which were and would be marked in France. This ensured that, to a certain degree, the surrounding memorial context was at the forefront of French responses to the atrocity.

While the LICRA saw the events at Carpentras through the lens of historical memory, the MRAP explained the desecration with reference to more contemporary concerns; namely the rising political status of the Front National and the revitalisation of disparate far-right organisations in France and across Europe.590 The Front National and, in particular, Le Pen, became the focus of outrage and anti-Le Penism ‘reached its apex’.591 The LICRA and MRAP articulated their own outrage towards Le Pen and the French far-right after Carpentras. The MRAP argued that whoever the perpetrators of the desecration may be, the Carpentras Affair could only be understood as part of a context in which ‘the Front National play the xenophobia card’.592 For Pierre-Bloch of the LICRA, the Carpentras Affair strengthened his resolve to ‘never stop denouncing Le Pen’ and the event was situated in a broader context with the rise of racism and antisemitism in France and across Europe.593

One of the most striking aspects of the LICRA’s response to the Carpentras affair and its far-right perpetrators was the organisation’s explicit affirmation of the necessity of solidarity not just with fellow French Jews but also with North African immigrants and their French-born descendants who were ‘the primary victims of racism’ in France at that time.594 Two months before the Carpentras desecration, three North Africans had been killed in France by racist violence over the course of a single week in La Ciotat, Saint-Florentin and Roanne.595 The LICRA used the Carpentras affair to assert its solidarity with North Africans in France and to condemn the far-right’s intent to turn Jews and Muslims against each other. 596 At the time, Pierre-Bloch had expressed his concerns that such racist violence represented a powder keg of hatred that was waiting to ignite. Following Carpentras, the LICRA exhibited a new understanding of racism in 590 ‘Perversions racistes: Que s’est-il passe a Carpentras?’, Différences (May/June/July 1990), p. 1. 591 Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, p. 137. 592 ‘Perversions racistes’, Différences (May/June/July 1990), p. 1. 593 Jean Pierre-Bloch, ‘Réactions de la LICRA’, Le Droit de Vivre (May/June/July 1990), p. 2. 594 Ibid, p.2. 595 ‘Flambée de meurtres et d’agressions racistes’, Le Droit de Vivre (March/April 1990), p. 1. 596 Ibid, p. 2.

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which the racism shown towards North Africans and Jews in France were increasingly viewed as shared experiences. This contradicts Maud Mandel’s claim that the Carpentras affair had the effect of marking a definitive distinction between antisemitism and other forms of racism in France.597 For the LICRA, it appeared to have had the opposite effect, demonstrating the organisation’s increasing flexibility of outlook over Jewish-Muslim relations and its expression of inter-ethnic solidarity. While this did not result in an embrace of colonial memory within the LICRA’s anti-racist memory culture (which remained indelibly shaped by its founding members’ experiences and memories of interwar antisemitism, Occupation and the Holocaust) it nevertheless revealed that the LICRA was increasingly vocal in its support of a pluricultural France. The events of 1990 prefigured the reappraisals of the LICRA’s existence and raison d’être.

On the 1 and 2 December 1990, the LICRA’s held its annual conference. Pierre-Bloch delivered an opening speech setting out his proposals for the future direction of the LICRA while reaffirming the historical roots of the organisation’s commitment to opposing antisemitism and racism. Speaking to an audience which included the Holocaust survivor and, at the time, Member of the European Parliament, Simone Veil, Pierre-Bloch spoke against a backdrop of rising antisemitism across Europe - particularly in the post-communist east – and in post-Carpentras France. Pierre-Bloch said,

Au lendemain de la seconde guerre mondiale, après les horreurs des camps, des fours crématoires, la Shoah, il a pu sembler que l'antisémitisme était définitivement jugulé, du moins en France. La LICA toujours pensé qu'il convenait de rester vigilant, que, sans doute 'la bête immonde' n'était qu'assoupie et qu'avec les temps, qui efface la mémoire, les crises économiques ou politiques qui favorisent les phénomènes de transfert du malaise social sur des boucs émissaires, elle pouvait renaître.598

597 Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France, p. 147. 598 ‘In the aftermath of the Second World War, after the horrors of the camps, the cremation ovens, the Shoah, it may have seemed that antisemitism had stalled, at least, in France. The LICA [sic] always thought it necessary to remain vigilant, that without doubt, the ‘foul beast’ was only dormant and that over time, the erasure of memory, the economic or political crises which favour the transference of social blame onto scapegoats, it [antisemitism] could be reborn.’: Jean Pierre-Bloch, ‘Les orientations du combat de la LICRA’, Le Droit de Vivre (December 1990-January 1991), p. 4.

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Even if antisemitism appeared to have ‘stalled’ across France in the wake of the Second World War, it nevertheless remained widespread across French society. It had never truly disappeared from Europe since the 1940s but had gone ‘underground’.599 The reconfiguration of anti-racism as a means of remaining vigilant against the resurgence of antisemitism was not uncommon amongst organisations that had their roots in the anti-fascist movements of the 1930s.600 Recent events in France and abroad only appeared to confirm the analysis that memorial vigilance remained necessary. Pierre-Bloch’s speech contrasted sharply with the argument made by Pierre-André Taguieff just over a year before (see chapter three) on the limitations of ‘anti-racisme commémoratif’.601 Current events appeared to confirm, for Pierre-Bloch and the LICRA, the necessity of wielding memory as a shield of vigilance.

This memorial vigilance was, however, not just confined to France’s borders. There was a proliferation of references to Europe in the early 1990s mirroring the LICRA’s increasing desire to respond to and cooperate with more transnational ways of thinking. On the question of ‘the future of immigrants in the Europe of tomorrow’, the LICRA reflected on what the principles of a harmonised European immigration policy should be given the ‘irreversible’ nature of the ‘European path...of integration’.602 By 1993, however, the LICRA would proclaim that Europe was ‘in peril’.603 The continued rise in racism, antisemitism and neo-nazism across a number of European countries deeply concerned the LICRA and prompted another call to arms for anti-racists in France and elsewhere. In the editorial entitled ‘Contre l’exclusion’, the LICRA stated that

Les réalités que nous découvrons chaque jour vont bien au-delà de nos pires craintes. Des forces maléfiques jusque là cachées se dechaînent, portées par un national populisme qui prend des formes diverses selon les contextes géo-politiques, allant de la revanche des ancien staliniens, aux ethnicismes exacerbés, en passant par le néo-

599 MacMaster, Racism in Europe, 1870-2000, p. 168.600 Jim House, ‘Memory and the Creation of Solidarity during the Decolonization of Algeria’, Yale French Studies, No. 118/119 (2010), p. 18.601 Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘Réagir face au racisme culturel’, Le Droit de Vivre (February 1989), p. 10.602 ‘Immigration: Les principes d’une politique européene’, Le Droit de Vivre (January/February 1990), p. 7. 603 ‘L’Europe en péril: La montée du racisme et de l’antisémitisme’, Le Droit de Vivre (December 1992-January 1993), p. 1.

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nazisme et le retour aux intègrismes religieux. L'Europe est malade

du racisme et de l'antisémitisme.604

The antidote to this sickness was constant vigilance and the safeguarding of memory for future generations. Memory was crucial to Pierre-Bloch’s vocation as an anti-racist and anti-antisemite.605 In 1994, the importance of memory’s pedagogical function became a prominent theme of the LICRA.606 A year later, Pierre-Bloch argued that historical memory was ‘fundamental’ to the LICRA’s ‘pedagogical’ mission.607 These assertions about the important of memorial vigilance and its pedagogical qualities coincided with the end of an important chain of fiftieth anniversaries of the Second World War and the Holocaust. In 1995, Pierre-Bloch turned 90 years old. At the same as he reached this age in the final decade of the twentieth century, there was a significant increase in his appeals to memory. This was, in large part, due to the desire to pass on the memory of the lived experiences of Pierre-Bloch, his colleagues and peers to younger generations. There was a particular concern over how to transmit the memory and legacy of the Second World War and, above all, the Holocaust to young people.

In this sense, the first half of the 1990s marked the beginning of an important transitional period for the LICRA. The first half of the decade was punctuated by notable anniversaries of the Second World War and Holocaust, generational shifts in the leadership (Pierre-Bloch, president of the LICRA since 1968, stood down in 1993) and ever-growing appeals for the LICRA to modernise and appeal to the youth. At the annual conference of the LICRA in 1992, direct appeals were made to the youth, encouraging greater intergenerational engagement and memory transmission.608 In 1994, the LICRA’s regular newspaper Le Droit de Vivre began to be produced as a glossier and more eye-catching magazine rather than a monthly broadsheet

604 The realities we discover every day go far beyond our worst fears. Hidden evil forces are unleashed, carried by a national populism that takes various forms depending on the geo-political contexts, ranging from the revenge of the old Stalinists, to exacerbated ethnicism(?), via neo-Nazism and the return to religious integralism. Europe is sick with racism and antisemitism.‘: Contre l’exclusion’, Le Droit de Vivre (December 1992-January 1993), p. 1. 605 See Jean-Pierre Allal, Contre les racisme; Les Combats de la LICRA (Paris, 2002), pp. 91-92. 606 ‘Pour une pédagogie de la mémoire’, Le Droit de Vivre (March-April 1994), p. 1. 607 ‘Jean Pierre-Bloch, ‘Amorcer un tournant historique’, Le Droit de Vivre (November/December 1994-January 1995), p. 3.608 ‘Motion finale’, Le Droit de Vivre (November 1992), p. 9.

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which had changed little from the format in which it was first published in 1932. This was done in response to requests for ‘un nouveau Droit de Vivre, plus jeune, plus dynamique, mieux lisible’ and to bring the LICRA up-to-date in the approach to the millennium.609

British anti-racism, Le Pen and the rise of the European far-rightAt the dawn of the 1990s, a spectre was haunting anti-racist Europe: the spectre of Le Pen. The electoral rise of the Front National had been monitored by British anti-racists over the course of the 1980s. However, by the beginning of the following decade, the Front National had become a permanent fixture in the French political landscape and, as a result, the most well-established far-right party in Europe.610 During the first round of presidential elections in 1988, Jean-Marie Le Pen secured fourteen per cent of the vote and the European parliamentary elections of 1989 saw the Front National secure nearly twelve per cent of the vote.611 This steady electoral rise came despite the outrage in France and beyond over Le Pen’s notorious comments about gas chambers being a ‘point de détail’ in 1987 as well as his antisemitic pun on the surname of the conservative minister Michel Durafour the following year.612 Over the course of the 1980s, Searchlight, the CARF and contributors to Race & Class had observed political developments in France. But by the early 1990s, there was a far greater urgency in the tone of anti-racist responses on both sides of the Channel towards the threat posed by the Front National and its growing political influence. Having secured 14.4 per cent of the vote during the presidential elections of 1988, Le Pen was significantly emboldened despite the notorious comments he made just under a year before.613 In the context of broader anti-racist fears about the rise of xenophobia, racism and the far-right across post-Cold War Europe, the performance of the Front National was a serious cause for concern. Furthermore, the response of British anti-racists to these developments as well as to the activism of their French counterparts

609 See Jean Pierre-Bloch, ‘Aux lecteurs’, Le Droit de Vivre (September-October 1994), p. 3. 610 David Martin-Castelnau, ‘La France aux Républicains’ in David Martin-Castelnau (ed.), Combattre le Front National (Paris, 1995), p. 14. 611 Jonathan Marcus, The National Front and French Politics: The Resistable Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 62-65. 612 Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, pp. 131-312.613 Fysh and Wolfreys, The Politics of Racism in France, p. 58.

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revealed a dynamic of tension and frustration within cross- Channel anti-racist activism.

This was, in the case of the CARF, preceded by a split with Searchlight magazine in 1990 as a result of fundamental differences in strategy and historical memory. Since 1979, the CARF and Searchlight magazine had worked together to counter fascism and racism in Britain. In 1990 however, the alliance between the two anti-racist groups had broken. While both acknowledged differences in anti-racist strategy and priorities, as well as a fundamental divergence in their ‘essentially different understanding of the events unfolding in the world today’614, the use of memory within their respective activist circles had also been causing problems. Following the split, CARF launched a new publication of their own in early 1991.615 The first issue contained a letter to Searchlight, civilly but firmly outlining the reasons for their departure. While the primary reasons for the split addressed differences in anti-racist strategy and what the CARF saw as Searchlight’s prioritisation of the anti-fascist struggle over that of anti-racism, the split between the two was also as a result of fundamental disagreements over anti-racist historical memories. The letter expressed the CARF’s frustration with what they saw as Searchlight’s narrow focus on Holocaust memory within their campaign against racism. As far as the CARF was concerned, it was no longer enough ‘[t]o situate fascism historically, ideologically linked to anti-Semitism and the holocaust [sic], and take up the refrain of ‘Never Again’.616 The CARF was frustrated by what it saw as the limits of Holocaust memory in challenging contemporary fascism and racism. Indeed, it was argued that such invocations of memory were inappropriate when applied to the contemporary black experience of racism. By focusing on Holocaust memory, CARF argued that Searchlight (deliberately or not) was more concerned with countering antisemitism rather than anti-black racism. CARF asserted that

we feel that the fight against fascism today has to involve both the fight against anti-Semitism [sic] and the fight against anti-black racism…While not detracting one iota from your fight against anti-Semitism, we also believe that the fight against anti-black racism, and particularly anti-Arab racism, claims as much attention as the fight

614 Editorial, ‘CARF is back: Letter to Searchlight’, CARF (February/March 1991), p. 2. 615 Copsey, Anti-fascism in Britain, p. 166. 616 CARF (February/March 1991), p. 2.

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against anti-Semitism. We see these as two prongs in the same fight.617

This episode illustrated at the time contestations over the efficacy of anti-racist memory culture. The primacy of Holocaust and Second World War memory for Searchlight was interpreted as marginalising the lived experiences and even historical memories of post-colonial victims of racism. The split between the CARF and Searchlight suggests that there was far from any consensus in anti-racist historical memories and that in referring to the past in order to fight contemporary racism, memories of the Holocaust could, at times, be more of a hindrance than a help in taking the anti-racist struggle forward.

Following the split, the CARF began to focus on developments in

European racism and anti-racism. In 1992, the CARF reported that they were working alongside the MRAP to analyse French racism and the extent of racist violence in France.618 In a report on murders of North Africans in France, the CARF stated bluntly that ‘the real France – like the real Britain – is a violently racist place for black people. It is the place where the new word Arabicides is finding its way into the French vocabulary’.619 This was written in the context of the latest British general election which had seen a largely unpredicted Conservative victory under Prime Minister John Major.620 This latest political development prompted the CARF to lament ‘Thirteen years of Tory racism! Plus another five. Eighteen years: a whole generation brought up on Tory racism’.621 Not only had Conservative rule from Thatcher to Major transformed Britain’s society and economy beyond recognition, it had, for the CARF, also fundamentally changed the nature of racism itself. It was no longer ‘an aspect, an attribute of British culture, but something tied into the very fabric of British society’. Racism, the CARF argued, had been woven ‘into the values, customs and morality of people’.622 While this was a dubious claim on a number of levels – the presence of racism in British society and culture had far deeper historical roots long preceding Thatcher’s premiership – the CARF was situating its

617 Ibid, p. 2. 618 The CARF may have been more enthusiastic about this collaboration than the MRAP as there is little to no mention of working alongside the CARF in the public literature of the MRAP at any point between January and June 1992. 619 ‘Arabicide in France’, CARF (May/June 1992), pp. 4-5. 620 Jeremy Black, Britain since the Seventies: Politics and Society in the Consumer Age (London, 2004), p. 7.621 ‘Another Racism, Another Fight’, CARF (May/June 1992), p. 2. 622 Ibid, p. 2.

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analysis of racism in British society and politics in a broader European context. Over the course of the late 1970s and 1980s, British and French governments and political parties had been concerned to outflank the far-right. From Thatcher’s notorious comments in January 1978 about British peoples’ fears over the country being ‘rather swamped by people with a different culture’ to Edith Cresson’s pledge to toughen France’s immigration laws in 1991, it was hoped that the electoral and social threat posed by the far-right in both countries could be minimised by playing to the racist gallery.623

Later that year, the CARF reported on life in the banlieues for North Africans in Paris, interviewing young beurs who criticised the ‘sanitised anti-racism of the politically acceptable SOS Racisme’.624 Race & Class featured articles by Catherine Lloyd who wrote on the nature of France’s republican assimilationist approach to citizenship.625 It was also during this period that Searchlight began to devote the final page of its monthly edition to an article exchange, publishing translated articles from the French anti-racist and anti-fascist journal Reflex. Reflex was introduced by Searchlight as its French equivalent which carried out ‘excellent research and analysis’ and possessed ‘a strong sense of international cooperation’ in reporting on racism in France and across Europe. In particular, Reflex was a valuable source of information on the activities of the Front National and wider far-right in France.

There was a palpable sense of urgency from within the British anti-racist movement about the growing status of the FN. In 1990, shortly after the Carpentras desecration, Searchlight reported on the Front National’s legitimisation of racism in French public life and expressed fears about the shared fate of France’s Jewish and Muslim communities – both the largest in Europe - at the hands of ‘Le Pen’s supporters’.626 At the beginning of 1991, Searchlight expressed its fear that ‘Le Pen’s support shows no real sign of declining’.627 Such concerns led to the founding of the Campaign against Fascism in Europe (CAFE) at the turn of 1991 and 1992 by the Campaign against Fascism in France (CAFF) and Committee to Stop Le Pen. Despite their 623 See Margaret Thatcher, ‘TV interview for Granada World in Action’ in Margaret Thatcher Foundation (27 January 1978) [Source: https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103485]: see also, Fysh and Wolfreys, The Politics of Racism in France, p. 72.624 ‘Trouble on the “Banlieue”, CARF (November/December 1992), p. 7. 625 See Catherine Lloyd and Hazel Waters, ‘France: One Culture, One People?’, Race & Class (January 1991), pp. 49-65.626 ‘We are all in the front line now’, Searchlight (June 1990), p. 3. 627 ‘Battles to be Won’, Searchlight (January 1991), p. 2.

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claim to have a broad European outlook, it was clear throughout the pages of the CAFE pamphlet that the primary concern was France.

The very first edition of CAFE’s pamphlet reported Le Pen’s visit to London on 6 December 1991 and the success of the anti-fascist and anti-racist demonstration against his visit. Through the Committee to Stop Le Pen, around 1,500 anti-racist/anti-fascist demonstrators turned out to oppose his presence.628 A month later, the frontpage headline of CAFE triumphantly stated, ‘LE PEN DRIVEN OUT’, and the editorial proclaimed Britain as the ‘weakest link in the Euro-fascist network’.629 The headline’s clear echo of one of the key phrases in anti-fascist history: ‘They shall not pass!’ clearly sought to present the demonstration against Le Pen within the tradition of British anti-fascist resistance. Searchlight lauded the demonstration as a fine example of ‘what unity can do in fighting fascism and racism’ – an implicit criticism of the divisions it saw as being fostered by the recent creation of Anti-Racist Alliance.630 In France, the MRAP took notice of the ‘Manifs anti-Le Pen en Grande-Bretagne’, reporting on the efforts by Members of Parliament and anti-fascist protestors to prevent Le Pen’s entry into Britain.631

The triumphalist and self-congratulatory tone of British anti-racist accounts of their own demonstration against the figurehead of the French far-right contrasted sharply with their criticisms of their French anti-racist counterparts. The February 1992 issue of CAFE carried an article asking, ‘How are the French anti-racists fighting back, and is it working?’. It reported on a march in Paris on 25 January 1992 organised by ‘four of the largest anti-racist and immigrants organisations in France; SOS-Racisme, MRAP, FASTI and the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (LDH).632 The demonstration had had, what Mouloud Aounit described as, ‘l’effet d’un électrochoc’.633 But despite the size of the march (at an estimate of 50-100,000 attendees, it certainly boasted far more bodies in the streets than the London demonstration against Le Pen), the CAFE article emphasized the point that anti-racist rallies and demonstrations in France ‘have not tried to physically prevent or break up the fascist meetings’.634

628 Copsey, Anti-fascism in Britain, p. 191.629 Campaign against Fascism in Europe (CAFE), (January 1992), p. 1.630 ‘Stop Le Pen’, Searchlight (January 1992), p. 5. 631 ‘Manifs anti-Le Pen en Grande-Bretagne’, Différences (January 1992), p. 8. 632 CAFE (February 1992), p. 2. 633 Mouloud Aounit, ‘Édito: 25 Janvier, L’Espoir Retrouvé’, Différences (February 1992), p. 1. 634 CAFE (February 1992), p. 2 [Italics in original text].

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Peaceful protest was, as far as CAFE was concerned, not enough to push anti-racism forwards. It was not uncommon for anti-racists in Britain to adopt the aggressive and, at times, violent tactics traditionally used by anti-fascist protestors. The tradition of physical resistance to the far-right in the form of street violence, à la Cable Street 1936, is one that has long been maintained within British anti-fascist circles. Sean Birchall has argued that the use of physical violence was more important than is commonly acknowledged in countering the far-right in Britain, claiming that ‘it was a strikingly illiberal militant anti-fascism that did all the heavy lifting’.635 At a time when the far-right appeared to be making gains in France, anti-racists in Britain expressed bafflement at what they saw as a more pacific (and therefore ineffective) approach to countering the Front National.

CAFE argued that the French anti-racist opposition to the Front National was ‘on the wrong track’.636 Their founders did not believe that French anti-racists appreciated the seriousness of the situation as they did. Indeed, this point has been echoed by Peter Fysh and Jim Wolfreys who have argued that one of the key shortcomings of the anti-racist movement in France was its failure to understand the nature and aims of the Front National.637 This conviction was articulated in a particularly urgent way in the second edition of CAFE’s monthly pamphlet:

‘Le Pen’s fascist organisation is knocking on the gates of power [sic]…The smashing of the Front National as a political force must be a priority in France. There must be a determined effort to unite the people who stand to suffer the most at the hands of Le Pen – Arabs, Black people, Jews, Gays, the disabled etc, who are marked out for mass slaughter under Le Pen’s hidden agenda.’638

Despite the urgency of such warnings about the Front National’s plans for power, the criticism of France’s anti-racist movements – who were under no illusions themselves about the danger posed by Le Penisme – was rather unfair. The LICRA repeatedly condemned Le Pen as a fascist and a ‘child of Pétain’ and

635 Sean Birchall, Beating the Fascists: The Untold Story of Anti-Fascist Action (London, 2010), p. 18. 636 CAFE, p.2.637 Peter Fysh and Jim Wolfreys, The Politics of Racism in France (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 3. 638 CAFE (February 1992), p. 2.

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the MRAP were quick to condemn Le Pen for his Holocaust denial.639 In December 1989, Jean Pierre-Bloch appeared on national television to denounce Le Pen in no uncertain terms as a fascist and antisemite.640 Yet where British and French anti-racists converged in their assessment of the Front National and the danger it posed to ethnic and religious minorities living in France was the invocation of the past in predicting the potential outcome of the Front National coming to power. By stating that genocide was the goal of Le Pen’s ‘hidden agenda’ reflects the role that the past played in furnishing anti-racism with an urgent sense of moral responsibility to counter racism. While the Holocaust is not explicitly mentioned in this passage, it is the unspoken point of moral and historical reference. The reference to fascism, power and its potential victims ensured that one would not have to read too deeply to understand the historical evocation behind the words. As a means of legitimation and mobilisation, the recent past played a crucial role.641 It also played a part in British-French anti-racist interaction, though in this case, it seemed that history was being invoked by British anti-racists as a rebuke to their French counterparts for ostensibly ‘ignoring an immediate and deadly threat – the rise of fascism’.642

The CAFE’s assertion about the Front National was representative of a strain of British exceptionalism within British anti-racism. There was, at times, a tendency for anti-racists in Britain to exhibit a certain ‘know better’ attitude towards their counterparts not just in France, but elsewhere. Following the resurrection of the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) in January 1992 at a press conference held in the House of Commons by its original founders, Peter Hain, Paul Holborow and Ernie Roberts, an attempt was made to forge cross-border ties with other anti-racist and anti-fascist organisations.643 As in 1977, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) played an important role in the revival of the ANL. However, Searchlight, a vital source of support and information for the original ANL in the late 1970s, expressed its scepticism over the ANL’s latest incarnation, dismissing it as an ideological front for the SWP.644 In early 1992, representatives of the ANL – dismissed by Searchlight as ‘posers’ - travelled to

639 See, respectively, Alain Rollat, ‘La Jean-Marie Le Pen Connection’, Le Droit de Vivre (May 1985), p. 3 and ‘Une gaffe, une fête et toujours le haine ordinaire’, Différences (October 1987). 640 See Jean Pierre-Bloch, ‘Archive, Ina.fr’ (6 December 1989): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqijxJx8MBw [Last accessed: 05/06/2019].641 Alastair Bonnett, Anti-Racism (London, 2000), p. 9. 642 CAFE (February 1992), p. 2. 643 Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, p. 169.644 ‘The Politics of Deceit’, Searchlight (February 1992), p. 2.

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Paris at the invitation of the Parti Socialiste (PS). Searchlight derisively suggested that the leaders of the ANL would be in good company with ‘the jetsetters of SOS Racisme’, drawing comparisons between their media-savvy and, in their view, sanitised anti-racism.645 However, in June, Searchlight reproduced a translated open letter from the French anti-fascist and anti-racist organisation Reflex which excoriated the ANL for distributing leaflets at an anti-Front National rally in France which contained ‘advice on how to beat the French fascists’. The leaflet distributed by the ANL was entitled ‘Commenter arreter Le Pen’ and infuriated organisations such as Reflex by its suggestion that anti-racist and anti-fascist movements in France were being too timid in denouncing Le Pen as a fascist and nazi.646 Reflex told the ANL that ‘we do not need or want your organisation coming to our country to patronise’ the French anti-fascist and anti-racist movement.647 The tirade continued with Reflex stating that they found it ‘insulting that you think you can send your lackeys over here to launch a campaign against Le Pen’.648 The indignation with which Reflex took the ANL to task, using a Searchlight as a mediator, reflected on the French side a exasperation with the attitude of superiority expressed by certain members and organisations of the British anti-fascist and anti-racist movement.

There were tensions, therefore, between British and French anti-racists in the early 1990s. While both were highly anxious about the seemingly unstoppable forward march of the Front National there was severe disagreement on both sides of the Channel on how best to stop Le Pen in his tracks. In certain anti-racist circles in Britain, there was a tendency to – as Reflex noted – adopt a patronising attitude towards their French counterparts. As exhibited by the reformed ANL, there was an arrogance in approach to French anti-racism and anti-fascism which suggested that since the success of the ANL against the National Front in the late 1970s and early 1980s they knew best how to conduct an effective struggle against racism and the far-right. They nevertheless appeared blind to the fact that the national circumstances and political context in which the Front National flourished and the distinctive character and history of racism necessarily meant that the terrain on which the

645 Ibid., p. 2. 646 See Jeremy Tranmer, ‘The Other as Home-grown Foreigner: British Anti-fascists and the Extreme Right’, in Janine Dove-Rumé, Michel Naumann and Tri Tran (eds.), L’Autre (Tours, 2008), pp. 361-370. 647 ‘Reflex letter to ANL’, Searchlight (June 1992), p. 18. 648 Ibid., 18.

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fight against fascism and racism was waged in France was very different to that of Britain over a decade earlier.

A key feature of anti-racist rhetoric and literature is the tone of urgency which stemmed from a specifically anti-racist reading of history. From CAFE headlines announcing that France was in a state of crisis in early 1992 as a result of Le Pen’s growing popularity to Searchlight’s sober editorials warning of the germ of Nazism within British society’s midst, the fight against racism and fascism was presented as a moral and historical imperative. History was integral to anti-racism as a means of justification and as a way of presenting anti-racists with clear signposts directing them away from the road to fascism and potential genocide.649 By making reference to Hitler, Nazism or the colonial past, anti-racists were able to situate themselves within a historical tradition of resistance and also to use history and memory as part of their activism against racism in the present. An example of this current of anti-racist memory operating on a European level could be seen articulated in a CARF editorial in November 1991. It was entitled ‘Remember Kristallnacht: Stop the pogroms’ and marked the fifty-third anniversary of 9-10 November 1938 in which Jews throughout Nazi Germany were attacked and Jewish-owned stores, synagogues and buildings were ransacked.650 Connecting the past and present, the CARF called for a picket of the German embassy in London on the 9 and 10 November to mark the anniversary but also to condemn ‘the intensity of the racial violence’ being carried out in Germany against refugees.651 That the 9 November marked another significant date in recent German history – the fall of the Berlin Wall – was not remarked upon. The explicit connection made between past and present, Jews in the 1930s and refugees in the early 1990s and the persistence of racism and the alternation of its victims is a prime example of the manner in which anti-racists brought the past to bear on the present.

CARF, Race & Class and the Legacies of European EmpireIn 1992, the CARF warned of ‘the growing momentum of the far-right’ across Europe and the prospect of racism re-entering the political mainstream. However, whereas Searchlight was more concerned with the European far-

649 Alastair Bonnet, Anti-racism (London, 2000), p. 9. 650 Cesarani, Final Solution, pp. 181-199.651 ‘Editorial’, CARF (November/December 1991), p. 2.

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right, the CARF was more interested in what it saw as the racism woven into the institutions of the EU. The CARF sought to document ‘the racism pervasive in Europe’s institutions, its new asylum laws, the physical attacks on refugees, and the upsurge in anti-Arab racism’. The CARF made comparisons between the EU and the European tradition of empire and reminded its readers that ‘the anti-racist struggle cannot be separated from the anti-imperialist struggle’.652 This implied that the new ‘Fortress Europe’ to emerge in 1992 as the EU was not so much a positive step towards mutual co-operation between member-states and disavowal of Europe’s warring past as it was the latest chapter in the history of European empire-building.653

For some anti-racists, Europe’s colonial past and the failure of Europeans to adequately address and atone for this not only threw into question the efficacy of transnational anti-racist activism but also disqualified it from unifying. Sometime such criticisms came from outside the traditional organs of anti-racist media. Marcel Farry, writing in 1989 for the second-wave feminist magazine Spare Rib, was especially concerned by Europe’s colonial past, its contemporary consequences and the ostensible audacity that

[N]ow these same people are uniting. And they are uniting brazenly before the very eyes of those whose peoples they have decimated, the blood of millions still staining their hands…And unification would strengthen European power. So, for non Europeans, our consideration of this thing called European Unification requires us to look at the history of the last 500 years on this planet, at the death and destruction and pillage brought about by those who are to unite. Perhaps rather than a European renaissance, the time is more right for Europe’s long overdue acknowledgement of, and reparations for these crimes which continue to the present. These issues need to be examined in connection to European unifications, and clearly linked to the current hideous global situation of continued European imperialism and this thing called ‘Third World Debt’, in which somehow the European nations along with their Western World descendants, have managed to construct a situation in which those whom they decimated now pay them compensation.654

652 ‘Editorial’, CARF (September/October 1992), p. 2.653 Ibid., p. 2. 654 Marcel Farry, ‘Europe 1992: An Unholy Alliance’, Spare Rib (June 1989), pp. 40-41.

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Throughout the essay Farry challenged and indeed condemned post-colonial Europe’s refusal to address the role racism played in constructing what Paul Gilroy has since referred to as ‘the life of the post-imperial polity’.655 This was an intensely historically-conscious interpretation of contemporary developments and Farry argued for the necessity of Europe to confront its imperial legacy and emphasising the continuity between Europe’s shared past and present. Farry continued by warning against a future in which Europe became unmoored from its past;

‘While the past has been clearly documented, discussion of the present European political climate is often clouded by an illusion that fascism, racism and imperialism are concepts confined to Europe’s past and even among some sections of the European left, despite the overwhelming amount of evidence available to the contrary, there is still a clinging to a concept of a libertarian Europe which promotes freedom and democracy’.656

Just because the Cold War had come to an end, it did not mean that racism, colonialism and totalitarianism were phenomena consigned neatly and comfortingly to Europe’s past. The events of 1989, German reunification and the collapse of the Soviet Union did not represent the ‘end of history’ that some proclaimed. Writing in the vein of Hannah Arendt, historically-conscious anti-racists recognised that racism and colonialism were inescapable features of modernity and as alive in the contemporary moment as they had been in the past.657

Sometimes colonial memory extended well beyond the traditionally conceived ‘age of empire’ of the late nineteenth century.658 The five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ fated voyage was subject to scrutiny by Race & Class. At the beginning of the year, the first issue was dedicated to the anniversary and the enduring consequences that the ‘discovery’ of the New World had for South America and the development of modern racism. As Hazel Waters made clear in the editorial, Columbus’ journey did not just open ‘a path to the

655 Gilroy, Post-colonial Melancholia, p. 12. 656 Farry, ‘Europe 1992’, p. 41. 657 See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London, 1967). 658 See, for example, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (London, 2003).

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decimation of the Americas’ but it also forged a ‘passage…to the full-blown ideology and practice of modern racism’.659 In this issue, anti-racist intellectuals and academics from around the world sought to place this event and its consequences within a far broader historical context, locating the contemporary struggle against racism within a transnational and longer-term background. The CARF magazine also had much to say about the anniversary, objecting in particular to Liverpool City Council’s decision to host the ‘Columbus Regatta’ of tall ships ‘as a commemoration of the slave trade routes’ on the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of the New World. The CARF argued that such an event glorified ‘the colonial invasion and continuing exploitation of the Americas’ and uncritically celebrated a white, Christian vision of ‘European civilisation’. The CARF was concerned about the implied message of such an event:

These celebrations also contribute to racism within Europe. If Columbus represents Europe, then the Latin American, African and Asian communities within Europe are being told they don’t exist…For black communities in Liverpool 8, a regatta which follows the slave route to Liverpool is an insult to their identity’.660

There had also been plans to relocate a statue of Columbus in Liverpool to celebrate Columbus day on the 12 October. Local Labour councillor and anti-racist, Sarah Norman, had criticised this move arguing that ‘(Columbus) heralded genocide, imperialism and slavery. It is wrong to continue to commemorate these links’.661 Such interconnecting references to Europe’s colonial heritage, the slave trade and their localised historical relation to Liverpool bear resemblance to what Michael Rothberg has coined ‘multidirectional memories’.662 This highly localised controversy over the quincentenary of Columbus’ voyage revealed the extent to which – among anti-racists at least – history and memory was not just multi-layered but intersecting across space and time. In bringing together the legacy of Columbus, slavery and centuries of European colonialism to bear on the city of Liverpool whose

659 Hazel Waters, ‘Editorial’, Race & Class, Vol. 33, Issue 3 (January 1992), p. v.660 ‘Columbus: A Colonial Celebration’, CARF (September/October 1991), p. 6.661 ‘Columbus set to be a slave to political fashion’, The Independent (12 September 1992). 662 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, 2009).

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inhabitants were profoundly shaped by this past, an anti-racist reading of history sought to reappraise this year of commemoration.

The absence of reference to colonial legacies closer in time and space is, however, striking. Indeed, by making reference to the European ‘discovery’ of the New World and its legacy, Columbus was presented as the grandfather of European colonialism, responsible for initiating centuries of colonial exploitation and sketching out the early contours of contemporary racism. Despite these anti-racist expressions of indignation towards these commemorative events, it is also notable that while there is passing acknowledgement of Liverpool’s specific history as one of the primary cities of empire and its role in the international slave trade by CARF, only indirect mention is made to the role Britain’s colonial history played in this. Britain’s own imperial legacy and involvement in the slave trade is, in CARF’s article regarding the anniversary, collapsed into more general references to Europe’s history of invasion and colonial exploitation. More important appeared to be the Europeanisation of this colonial legacy which (consciously or not) diverted attention away from the highly particular nature of Britain’s imperial history. This exposes something of an inconsistency. While anti-racists could be at the very forefront of discussions regarding Britain’s colonial past and its legacy, there was at times a selective approach to historical memory.

It was around this significant anniversary period that attitudes – both scholarly and popular – towards Columbus and the legacy of European empires underwent significant reappraisal.663 However, this shift in the way that Columbus was remembered also influenced and coincided with contemporary developments in European history. Connections were drawn by anti-racists between the legacy of the European encounter with ‘the Other’ and its consequent colonialism and racism and the push towards European integration and the continuation of this history of inclusion and exclusion on racial lines.

The contemporary European context is significant due to the preparations being made for 1992, a renewed vigour for European integration and the launching of the single market. For anti-racists, ‘1992’ and the run-up to this latest stage in integration was met with a mix of ambivalence, scepticism and outright hostility which will be explored in further detail below. CARF was,

663 See T. Kubal, Cultural Movements and Collective Memory: Christopher Columbus and the Rewriting of the National Origin Myth (New York, 2008). See also Carla Rahn Phillips and William D. Phillips, ‘Christopher Columbus in United States Historiography: Biography as Projection’, in The History Teacher, Vol. 25:2 (February 1992).

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however, especially concerned that ‘1992’ would contribute to the realisation of ‘the idea of Fortress Europe, promoting a vision of Europe which denies the past and excludes the present for the majority of the world’s peoples’.664 The notion of forgetting the colonial past in order to deny others (outside Europe) the prosperity and security of the present was a far from uncommon anti-racist interpretation of European integration. If the creation of the European Union was little more than the continuation of European imperialism by other means then anti-racists, as committed anti-imperialists, would resist.

Early on in the 1990s, this appeared to have come to pass for the CARF collective. In 1993, the CARF ran a feature titled, ‘Immigration Appeals: A Colonial Outpost?’ shortly after the passage of the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Bill through parliament earlier that year. The article examined this new right to appeal and the chances of its success for those detained in Harmondsworth’s immigration facility and referred to the fact that observers ‘got the feeling that adjudicators based there considered themselves in some colonial outpost’.665 Based on the testimonies of observers at such facilities – it is not made clear if the observers are affiliated with CARF magazine – the article reports on the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers by immigration officials who operate in an atmosphere ‘where racism is given free rein within the framework of rigidly applied and inhuman rules’.666 This reference to Britain’s colonial legacy, while muted, is significant in its attempt to draw a direct connection between the historical treatment and dehumanisation of the colonised and the treatment of people seeking asylum in contemporary Britain. A continuity was recognised between Britain’s colonial past and its post-colonial present, with the former shaping the latter. This was by no means an original observation. Sivanandan, writing a decade earlier, had already noted how parliamentary bills and acts relating to immigration were inevitably ‘fashioned in the matrix of colonial-capitalist practices and beliefs’.667 For intellectuals like Sivanandan and anti-racist bodies like CARF, there had been no ‘end of empire’. Indeed, the tongue-in-cheek phrase ‘the empire strikes back’ had taken on another meaning. Not only did it refer to the movement of the formerly colonised to the former imperial motherland, but it now came to refer to the

664 ‘Columbus’, CARF (Sept/Oct 1991)., p. 6. 665 ‘Immigration Appeals: A colonial outpost?’, CARF (July/August 1993), p. 11. [Italics my emphasis].666 Ibid., p. 11. 667 Ambalavaner Sivanandan, ‘From resistance to rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles in Britain’, Race & Class, Vol. 23, No. 2/3 (1981/1982), p.124.

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application of colonial means of governance and detention – hitherto practiced overseas – in the metropole.

Conclusion

This chapter has sought to demonstrate the various ways in which British and French anti-racists responded and adapted to the rapidly changing circumstances of a post-Cold War era. As history swung on the hinge from the 1980s to 1990s, a variety of complex factors contributed to what one might characterise as a Europeanisation of anti-racist concerns. The transformation of the geopolitical landscape, the intensification of racism and antisemitism and the push towards European integration set the agenda for anti-racist activism in the first half of the 1990s.668 While British and French anti-racists were by no means ignorant of broader European or, indeed, global affairs prior to the 1990s, the end of the Cold War and its complex consequences for Europe east and west required thinking and acting on a more transnational scale. The end of the 1980s and the dawn of the 1990s was, therefore, a moment of expansion in the outlook and aims of anti-racists on either side of the Channel.

This historical moment was also significant for the development of anti-racist memory culture. From Searchlight’s fears over German reunification and the return of the far-right in east-central Europe to the LICRA’s response to the Carpentras desecration which was placed in a broader European context, the old spectres raised by contemporary events transcended national boundaries and forced anti-racists to reflect, in various ways, on the ‘dimension Européenne’ to their vocation. Between 1989 and 1995, Europe marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Second World War. The year 1992 was moment of European co-operation and deeper integration as well as the five hundredth anniversary of the fateful voyage of Christopher Columbus marked by anti-racists and anti-imperialists as the founding moment of modern European colonialism and empire-building. These events and anniversaries encouraged anti-racist thinking on a European scale and brought national memory cultures under the aegis of Europe; both as place and idea.

Despite the new national and European contexts in which anti-racists began to operate in the 1990s, continuities nevertheless remained in anti-racist 668 Fella and Ruzza, ‘Anti-Racist Movements in the European Union: Between National Specificity and Europeanisation’, in Fella and Ruzza (eds.), Anti-Racist Movements in the EU, p. 6.

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memory. However, memories of the Holocaust and European colonialism also underwent a transformation in the 1990s. In the fight against racism at the end of the twentieth century, Holocaust and colonial memory began to intersect with each other rather than remaining in distinct memorial spheres. While such encounters remained tentative as anti-racists such as Albert Lévy of the MRAP sought to justify bringing both spheres of memory into a greater dialogue with each other, space nevertheless began to be created for a more nuanced historical memory of racism.

Chapter Five

Interconnected memories and the ‘twin evils of racism and fascism’, c. 1992-2001

‘Le devoir de mémoire, si fréquemment invoqué, ne consiste pas seulement à honorer les morts d'hier, mais à empêcher que d'autre innocents subissent le même sort aujourd'hui et demain.’669

Albert Lévy

Introduction

The closing years of the twentieth century saw important developments in the sphere of remembering. This chapter will explore the moments of encounter between anti-racist Holocaust and colonial memory cultures. It will also explore the enduring silences or omissions of certain anti-racists, particularly on the subject of colonial memory. While the MRAP and, to a lesser extent, the LICRA

669 ‘The duty to remember, so often invoked, does not only consist of honouring the dead of yesterday, but to prevent other innocents from suffering the same fate today and tomorrow.’ Albert Lévy, ‘Le négationnisme et la mémoire’, Différences (June 1996), p. 7.

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increasingly invoked memories of the Holocaust and colonialism together during the 1990s, Searchlight magazine continued to have little to say about Britain’s colonial past. In comparison to publications such as Race & Class which regularly reflected on the centrality of Britain’s colonial legacy to the lived experiences of racism within post-colonial communities at the turn of the millennium, this was a striking absence which will be the subject of deeper exploration in this chapter. On both sides of the Channel, anti-racism was fragmented in various ways. Since the launch of SOS Racisme, deep fractures had opened up between France’s established anti-racist movements.670 Yet, the same had also been true of anti-racism in Britain. Indeed, the fractured nature of British anti-racism had been something of a chronic condition since the demise of the Anti-Nazi League in 1981.671 Was such fragmentation reflected in anti-racist memory cultures? If so, how did this manifest at the turn of the century? If the anti-racisms on either side of the Channel were defined by their heterogeneity and diversity, then it follows that their respective memory cultures were also multifaceted and contested.

If, as the previous chapter argued, the turn of the decade from the 1980s to the 1990s marked a ‘turn to Europe’ among anti-racists in Britain and France then to what extent can the final years of the twentieth century be characterised as a decade of European remembering? With the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War, Europe was quite self-consciously crossing the threshold between the old and the new in the approach to the second millennium. Indeed, this recognition was reinforced by the renewed push towards ‘ever closer union’ between the existing member-states (and now, with the appearance of new autonomous nations in the east, potential future members) by the creation of the European Union and the proposals for a currency union to be introduced in 1999 with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in February 1992. Such a momentous step towards political and monetary union between the nation-states of the EU coincided with the reappearance of war and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans: an unwelcome and unsettling reminder of that which many Europeans believed had been long consigned to history. Despite Jacques Poos’ declaration that the ‘hour of

670 Emmanuel Debono, ‘Antiracism: A Failed Fight or the End of an Era?’, in Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Dominic Thomas (eds.), The Colonial Legacy in France: Fracture, Rupture and Apartheid, trans. Alexis Pernsteiner (Indiana, 2017), p. 370. 671 Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, p. 153.

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Europe’ had dawned, the ghosts of the old Europe haunted the birthing of the new.672

The 1990s was a period in which memory cultures of the Holocaust and European colonialism began to encounter each other on a more frequent if uneven basis. While Michael Rothberg has argued that it was the memory of the Holocaust which ‘contributed to the articulation of other histories’ and helped to open up conduits of colonial memory, both memory cultures – particularly when understood in the context of anti-racist circles – developed and emerged on their terms.673 As historical events and processes, both the Holocaust and European colonialism were defined, in different ways, by their ‘racialized violence and horror’.674 In France, le devoir de mémoire (‘the duty to remember’) became a widely established principle in the 1990s, representing ‘a mentality towards past and present of unpredictable potential’.675 The official recognition by the French president, Jacques Chirac, of the French Republic’s complicity in the Holocaust in 1995 and the high profile trial of Maurice Papon between October 1997 and April 1998 for crimes against humanity were interpreted as moments in which France finally accepted national responsibility for the collaboration of the Vichy regime with the Third Reich.676 While memories in Britain of the Second World War and the Holocaust did not carry moral implications as serious as those in France, it nevertheless took on a greater public visibility in the 1990s and was, as a result, subjected to ever-greater contestation across post-Cold War Europe.677

The Second World War and the Holocaust dominated Western Europe’s memory landscape of the 1990s. However, this was also a period during which memories of Europe’s colonial past rose to the surface of public consciousness. Together, the narratives of colonialism and the Holocaust were increasingly, as

672 Judt, Postwar, p. 676.673 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, p. 6.674 Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (Oxford, 2013), p. 4.675 Rod Kedward, La Vie en bleu: France and the French since 1900 (London, 2005), p. 622.676 Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford, 1999), p. 114. On the Papon trial in the context of greater engagement with the Vichy past following Chirac’s 1995 speech see Christopher Flood, ‘Extreme Right-Wing Perspectives on the Touvier and Papon Trials’, in Richard J. Golsan (ed.), The Papon Affair: Memory and Justice on Trial (London, 2000), pp. 75-76.677 Lucy Noakes and Juliette Pattinson, ‘’Keep calm and carry on’: The cultural memory of the Second World War in Britain’, in Lucy Noakes and Juliette Pattinson (eds.), British Cultural Memory and the Second World War (London, 2014), p. 2.

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Max Silverman has put it, ‘overlapping realms of history, memory and imagination’.678 In the cases of Britain and France there was a significant difference in the strength of the ripples of memory on the surface of public awareness. In France, the events of the 17 October 1961 served as a nodal point around which colonial memories (primarily those of the Algerian War of Independence) revolved. As Jim House and Neil MacMaster have demonstrated, the roles of anti-racist and pro-immigrant organisations were crucial in guarding and publicising this memory culture and establishing sites such as the Pont Saint-Michel in Paris as veritable lieux de mémoires.679 Furthermore, Papon’s role in overseeing the events of 17 October 1961 as the Prefect of the Paris Police, two decades after working as a Vichy civil servant, prompted reflections on the historical continuities between the Nazi Occupation and the events of the Algerian War of Independence. While there was far less of a memory explosion in Britain, there was nevertheless an increasing historical interest in Britain’s imperial legacy which would materialise in a more popular, palatable and, as some would argue, revisionist manner in the 2000s.680 This rehabilitation of imperial history would be mirrored in France by the passage of the loi du 23 février 2005 which praised the French men and women who had contributed to the establishment and maintenance of colonial rule.681 It also required school teachers to educate pupils in the ‘positive values’ of French colonialism and its history. By the time the new law was repealed later that year by Chirac, ‘les guerres des mémoires’ had truly begun.682 While it is beyond the scope of this present study to explore the different destinies of colonial memory in Britain and France in the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is important to explore the development of colonial memory in the previous decade the better to trace the historical, memorial and political development of both.

The 1990s saw increasing institutional and public recognition of the necessity of commemorating the Holocaust after decades of ‘slow and

678 Max Silverman, ‘Interconnected Histories: Holocaust and Empire in the Cultural Imaginary’, in French Studies 62:4, (October 2008), p. 420. 679 House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, pp. 290-295. 680 See, for example, Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain made the Modern World (London, 2003). 681 Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire, ‘La fracture coloniale: une crise française’, in Blanchard, Bancel and Lemaire (eds.), La fracture coloniale: La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris, 2005), pp. 18-19.682 Itay Lotem, ‘Anti-Racist Activism and the Memory of Colonialism: Race as republican critique after 2005’, in Modern and Contemporary France, 24:3 (2016), p. 284.

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ponderous’ development.683 In 1993, the French government designated the 16 July as the very first official day of national Holocaust commemoration in Europe.684 In contrast, Britain’s first official day of Holocaust remembrance was not held until 27 January 2001 confirming Stefan Berger’s observation that a memorial culture of the Holocaust in Britain was, in comparison to other European countries, a considerably late development.685 The dates chosen for commemoration also highlighted both countries’ different experiences of the Holocaust. The 16 July 1942 was the date of the Vel d’Hiv roundups in Paris while Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day did not mark the anniversary of the British and Canadian armies’ liberation of Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945 but rather the date of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz. However, well before the officialisation of memory on a national scale, anti-racists had been invoking Holocaust and colonial memories for some time. What was different about the 1990s, however, was the increasing flexibility within anti-racist memory cultures to accommodate and bring together these distinctive spheres of memory. The anniversaries of the early-to-mid 1990s which marked half a century since the Second World War also concentrated minds, not least among veteran anti-racist campaigners whose vocations were rooted in highly personal experiences of antisemitism, anti-fascism, Occupation (in the French case) and war. The experiences which had, in different ways, marked the youths, early careers and later legacies of Jean Pierre-Bloch, Maurice Ludmer and Albert Lévy were not, however, distant but continual reminders of the fundamentally ‘pedagogical’ nature of memory and the necessity of transmitting the historical memory of the Holocaust above all to a younger generation of Europeans.686 In the case of Ludmer, the importance of sustaining the memory of Britain’s anti-fascist and anti-racist tradition was reflected in Searchlight’s repeated invocation of the anti-fascist slogan of Cable Street and the International Brigades, ‘They shall not pass’.687 Identifying the Second World War as the historical moment in which ‘the roots of our fight against the twin evils of

683 Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford, 1994), p. 269.684 Clifford, Commemorating the Holocaust, p. 1. 685 Berger, ‘Remembering the Second World War in Western Europe, 1945-2005’, in Pakier and Stråth (eds.), A European Memory?, p. 128. 686 See Jean Pierre-Bloch, ‘Amorcer un tournant historique’, Le Droit de Vivre (November/December 1994-January 1995), p. 3. 687 See ‘1975 to 1995: 20 Fighting Years’, Searchlight (February 1995), p. 4.

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racism and fascism lie’ was also a critical reminder of the weight this history bore upon the anti-racist cause.688

This chapter is fundamentally concerned with exploring – to paraphrase Paul Gilroy – the ‘knotted intersection’ of anti-racist memory cultures.689 How did anti-racists in Britain and France seek to navigate a post-Holocaust and increasingly post-colonial world? How did articulations of Holocaust and colonial memory advance anti-racist understandings of contemporary racism and the struggle against it? Did the 1990s see both memory cultures intertwine or did they largely continue to operate within their own respective spheres of memory? To what extent did the approach of the new millennium serve as a catalyst for deeper reflections on the legacies of racism and anti-racism of the last century? Just as anti-racist memory cultures were undergoing important shifts and developments, another important development of the 1990s on both sides of the Channel was the increasing focus on Muslims as the subjects of racialised discourse and as targets of racism on the streets and in political rhetoric. At the close of the century, Muslims appeared to be taking the place of Jews as the traditional bouc émissaires for society’s ills.690 Antisemitism by no means disappeared, yet there was by the late 1980s (following the Rushdie controversy and l’affaire du foulard) a turn in anti-racist attention towards the lived experience of anti-Muslim racism.691 While the mainstreaming of Islamophobia is beyond the scope of this thesis, this chapter will nevertheless consider what implications the reorientation of popular racism had for anti-racist memory cultures. By exploring how anti-racist Holocaust and colonial memory cultures diverged and intersected, this chapter will tease out the subtle developments of anti-racist thought and practice during the 1990s. Crucially, the new political cultures which emerged under the New Labour government and the cohabitation of the Chirac and Jospin government provided a very different backdrop for anti-racist activism on both sides of the Channel at the turn of the century. Furthermore, the end of the century posed new challenges for anti-racist activism and was an appropriate moment for reflections on the

688 ‘Editorial’, Searchlight (September 1989), p. 2. 689 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, 2000), p. 78. 690 Tariq Modood and Pnina Werbner (eds.), The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe: Racism, Identity and Community (London, 1997), p. 3.691 For an exploration of the extent to which antisemitism and Islamophobia have a long, shared history in Europe see James Renton and Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia: A Shared Story? (London, 2017).

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legacies of racism and anti-racism in the twentieth century and their lessons for the future.

Tentative Encounters: Remembering the Holocaust and colonial atrocities

Well before the events of 17 October 1961, the MRAP under Charles Palant had drawn parallels between the behaviour of the police towards Algerians under the Gaullist state and Jews under Vichy.692 In the 1990s, Palant’s successor, Mouloud Aounit, continued to make explicit connections between the memories of colonialism and those of the Holocaust and Vichy. The resurfacing of colonial memories in the early 1990s, revolving around the thirtieth anniversaries of the massacre of 17 October as well as the Charonne métro station massacre of February 1962, coincided with the fiftieth-anniversary commemorations of the Second World War. The early 1990s was also a period of intense public interest in the 1994 trial of Paul Touvier, a former milicien, which raised difficult questions about the legacy of collaboration in France.693 Despite this national context, events outside of France provided the catalyst for an increasingly ‘historicist’ anti-racist response. One of the major flashpoints of post-Cold War violent racism took place in the northern German city of Rostock where, in August 1992, an asylum hostel and its two-hundred residents were subject to firebombing and violence by the far-right.694 Writing two months later, in response to the ‘actes barbares’ of anti-immigrant violence in Rostock, Aounit placed contemporary European racism in a broader historical context arguing that

l'oubli de la mémoire taraude aussi le racisme. En France, le racisme anti-maghrébin se nourrit aussi du non-dit et l'amnésie collective autour de la guerre d'Algérie. Les brèches antisémites qui s'ouvrent aujourd'hui en France relèvent de la contre-offensive des révisionnistes, du blanchiment de Touvier, du piétinement dans la recherche des auteurs de la profanation du cimitière de Carpentras.695

692 Jim House, ‘Antiracist memories: The case of 17 October 1961 in historical perspective’, in Modern and Contemporary France 9:3 (2001), p. 359. 693 Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, pp. 135-137. 694 ‘Asylum Hostel under Attack’, The Guardian, 24 August 1992, p. 6. See also, Simon Green, ‘Immigration, Asylum and Citizenship in Germany: The impact of unification and the Berlin Republic’, in West European Politics, 24:4 (2001), p. 94: see also, Wilhelm Heitmeyer, ‘Hostility and Violence towards Foreigners in Germany’, in Björgo and Witte (eds.), Racist Violence in Europe, p. 19.695 ‘The forgetting of memory also taps into racism. In France, anti-Maghrebi racism also feeds on unspoken and collective amnesia around the Algerian war. The antisemitic

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Bringing together antisemitism and colonial racism across space and time, Aounit highlighted the shared experiences of marginalisation and discrimination for Jews and Muslims in France and hinted at the long history of entwined suffering. For Aounit, the legacies of antisemitism and colonial racism contributed to a shared victimhood which crossed national and historical boundaries.696 The general secretary of the MRAP also presented the perpetrators of contemporary racism as the heirs to a long tradition of exclusion, ‘parce que les bourreaux et les tortionnaires d'hier ont surgi d'un peuple comme les autres, la mobilisation des antiracistes sur les non-lieux de la mémoire est un acte pédagogique indispensable, salvateur’.697 Anti-racist mobilisation around historical memory reflected, for Aounit, how central history and memory were to understanding contemporary racism both in its colonial and antisemitic contexts. Racism towards North Africans possessed deep roots in France’s colonial past and one could easily trace the genealogy of French and European antisemitism in order to understand the nature of contemporary antisemitism, borne out of a long historical tradition and, as a more recent development, the trivialisation and outright denial of what happened to French and European Jews during the 1930s and 1940s. Anti-racists had a fundamental duty, Aounit suggested, of not only of remembering the racism of the past but actively using it in an instructive and didactic way to challenge the racism now meted out towards post-colonial minorities, Jews, refugees and asylum seekers.

While this may reflect, in part, a political use of memory, it nevertheless constituted an important stream which eventually flowed into the pool of anti-racist memory cultures in which memories of the Holocaust and colonialism flowed into each other. Tying together the historical and cultural threads of European antisemitism and colonial racism, Aounit suggested that the work of anti-racists in the 1990s depended upon recognising both of these histories, their particularities and points of intersection. Aounit demonstrated what Max Silverman has conceptualised as ‘palimpsestic memory’, reflecting an increasingly dynamic approach to Holocaust and colonial memory underpinned

breaches that are opening up today in France are the counter-offensive of the revisionists, the white-washing of Touvier, trampling in the search for the authors of the desecration of Carpentras cemetery.’, Mouloud Aounit, ‘La mémoire ou la honte’, Différences (October 1992), p. 1.696 See Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France (Princeton, 2014). 697 ‘Because the tormentors and torturers of yesterday arose from a people like the others, the mobilization of the anti-racists on the non-places of memory is an indispensable educational and salvational act.’: Aounit, ‘La mémoire ou la honte’, Différences (October 1992), p. 1.

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by an anti-racist ethic.698 The roundup of French and foreign-born Jews in July 1942 and the massacre of Algerian demonstrators on 17 October 1961 were events that highlighted the centrality of racism and colonialism to France’s twentieth-century experience. However, this emphatically historicist approach to anti-racist thought and practice was also grounded in current events. This remembering of the early 1990s was compounded by the rise in racism and hostility towards migrants across Western and post-communist Europe.699 The racist violence of Rostock – carrying as it did significant echoes from the past – was, for Aounit, yet a further stimulus for reflection on the parallels between the France’s colonial legacy, Vichy and European antisemitism:

Le 17 octobre 1992: 31ème anniversaire d'un massacre orchestré par un certain Papon où périrent 200 Algériens, où une rafle aussi méthodiquement menée que celle du Vel d'Hiv entraîna 11000 arrestations et 400 disparus. Le Mrap demandera, à cette occasion, l'ouverture des archives et un traitement autre de la guerre d'Algérie dans les manuels scolaires. Le 9 novembre, nous commémorerons le 54ème anniversaire de la tragique 'nuit de cristal'. Une riposte antiraciste à l'échelle européenne sera organisée. Le Mrap fera de cette date un point de départ de reconquête de la lutte contre toutes les exclusions de la mémoire. Pour que la mémoire ne s'efface pas et que ne se renouvellent pas l'horreur et la honte.700

In bringing together the 17 October 1961, the Vel d’Hiv round-ups of 16-17 July 1942, the Algerian War of Independence as well as the events of Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, Aounit presented these historical moments as stepping stones of anti-racist memory which cut across historical time and space. Aounit’s reference to ‘a certain Papon’ illustrated the notoriety Papon had acquired well before his trial began in 1997. While this does not so much reflect

698 Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, p. 4. 699 John Solomos and John Wrench, ‘Race and Racism in Contemporary Europe’, in John Wrench and John Solomos (eds.), Racism and Migration in Western Europe (Oxford, 1993), p. 4.700 ‘October 17, 1992: thirty-first anniversary of a massacre orchestrated by a certain Papon where 200 Algerians perished, where a raid conducted as methodically as the Vel d'Hiv led to 11,000 arrests and 400 missing. The MRAP asks, on this occasion, for the opening of the archives and a different treatment of the Algerian war in textbooks. On November 9, we will commemorate the fifty-fourth anniversary of the tragic Kristallnacht. An anti-racist response at European level will be organized. The MRAP will make this date a starting point of reconquest of the fight against all the exclusions of the memory. So that the memory does not disappear and that the horror and the shame are not renewed.’: Aounit, ‘La mémoire ou la honte’, Différences (October 1992), p. 1.

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‘multidirectional memory’ as it does clusters or ‘knots’ of memory, it nevertheless reveals an increasingly multi-layered and transnational assortment of historical memories.701 New streams were pouring into the pool of anti-racist memory cultures. In this example of anti-racist sites of memory, a peculiarly anti-racist interpretation of Europe’s twentieth century experience was being articulated. Revolving around a specific and present moment in time – a racist and anti-immigrant riot in North Germany – Aounit, keenly alert to the resonance of the past, interpreted his and the MRAP’s anti-racist response through the kaleidoscopic prism of history and memory. Significantly, this suggests a transnational anti-racist consciousness with events across Europe, whether in northern Germany or the south of France, awakening a broader European memory.

Reflections on memory could also be stimulated by new scholarship. In October 1994, Aounit’s predecessor, Albert Lévy reviewed the journalist and historian Yves Benot’s latest publication, Massacres coloniaux, 1944-1950: La IV République et la mise au pas de colonies françaises (1994) which examined the colonial massacres perpetrated by French soldiers overseas in Algeria, Madagascar and Cote d’Ivoire under the Fourth Republic.702 The book prompted Lévy to reflect on the challenge posed by historical memories of the colonial empire and the atrocities carried out in its name to the French national narrative;

On ne parle pas de corde dans la maison d'un pendu. Il est du plus mauvais goût, en France, d'évoquer les injustices et les crimes inhérents à la colonisation, plus encore d'en souligner le rôle décisif dans la politique des gouvernements de la République, toutes nuances confondues.703

For Lévy, there was a reason for the silence which continued to surround France’s colonial past. France had already been condemned by the reality of its colonial history, as explored by Benot. The metaphor about rope in the house of the hanged man is a striking one, powerfully capturing the determination of the French state not to recognise the atrocities of colonialism for what they were.

701 Michael Rothberg, ‘Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de Mémoire to Noeuds de Mémoire’, in Yale French Studies, 118/119 (2010), p. 8. 702 See Yves Benot, Massacres coloniaux: 1944-1950, la IV République et la mise au pas des colonies françaises (Paris, 1994). 703 We do not talk about rope in the house of the hanged man. It is in the worst taste to evoke the injustices and crimes inherent in French colonization and even more to emphasise their decisive role in the politics of the governments of the Republic, in all shades of opinion.’: Albert Lévy, ‘Mémoire du futur’, Différences (October 1994), p. 11.

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That the conflict in Algeria between 1954 and 1962 would not formally be recognised as a war in France for decades after the event is symbolic of this enduring forgetting.704 By the 1990s, the continued unwillingness of the French state to face up to its colonial past in a meaningful way contrasted sharply with efforts to address the legacy of Vichy. In 1994, François Mitterrand’s role in the Vichy regime before turning to the resistance was under national and international scrutiny.705 The tortuous proceedings against Paul Touvier had also cast the spotlight on the role of French citizens in the milice and their complicity with the Third Reich. However, Lévy was particularly alert to the comparative lack of national engagement with France’s colonial legacy and recognised the challenges involved in raising the issue of France’s colonial past and the atrocities committed in Algeria, Madagascar and elsewhere. Eclipsed as these memories were by the memory of Vichy and the pressing question of French collaboration, he nevertheless expressed his hope that ‘the day will come…where this (colonial) past will be openly debated, like Vichy today after half a century’.706 A few years later, Lévy continued in this vein when, in an article for Différences entitled ‘Le négationnisme et la mémoire’, the former president of the MRAP, called upon France to ‘recognise the facts of colonial history’ alongside those of the Holocaust.707 The context in which Lévy was writing is important. The development of French colonial memory in the 1990s has to be understood in the context of the growing recognition and institutionalisation of Holocaust memory and commemoration and the eruption of a decade-long civil war in Algeria. Crucially, it was also a consequence of what Benjamin Stora has characterised as ‘la crise du modèle républicain français de l’assimilation’ which emerged in the late 1980s with the bicentenary of the revolution and l'affaire du foulard.708

The global context of genocide in former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda in 1994 intensified the evocation of Holocaust and colonial memory in the mid-1990s.709 In the spring 1994 edition of Le Droit de Vivre, the editorial appealed 704 Mouloud Aounit, ‘Edito’, Différences (May 1994), p. 1. 705 Richard J. Golsan, ‘The Legacy of World War II in France: Mapping the Discourses of Memory’, in Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu (eds.), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (London, 2006), pp. 73-74. 706 Lévy, ‘Mémoire du futur’, Différences, p. 11. 707 Albert Lévy, ‘Le negationnisme et la memoire’, Différences (June 1996), p. 7.708 Benjamin Stora, ‘Traces de mémoires d’un empire disparu’, in Vaisse and Tombs (eds.), L’Histoire coloniale en debat, p. 109. 709 Arnd Bauerkämper, ‘Holocaust Memory and the Experiences of Migrants: Germany and Western Europe after 1945’, in Jacob S. Eder, Philip Gassert and Alan E. Steinweis (eds.), Holocaust Memory in a Globalizing World (Göttingen, 2017), p. 36.

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for ‘une pédagogie de la Mémoire’, urging younger members of the LICRA to learn about the Holocaust and the potential for racism in a post-Holocaust world to lead to similar atrocities. Indeed, this message was made all the more poignant through the editorial’s reference to ongoing ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia.710 Alongside events in Sarajevo, the attention of anti-racists was soon also diverted to Rwanda where the Hutu majority was engaged in deadly persecution of the Tutsi minority, resulting in the deaths of around 800,000 Rwandans between April and June 1994.711 Between the Balkans and Central Africa, Aounit lamented the return of ‘purification ethnique’ and connected Europe’s colonial past to the violence in Rwanda where ‘les cicatrices du colonialisme s'ouvrent, laissant jaillir le sang entre communautés’.712 These events contributed to an increasingly transnational conceptualisation of anti-racist Holocaust and colonial memories which were no longer solely stimulated by events taking place within national or European boundaries (for instance, the rue Copernic bombing of October 1980 or Carpentras in May 1990) but were starting to take on a more global resonance.

In 1996, Albert Lévy was still preoccupied by questions about memory and the ethical and pedagogical responsibilities of remembering the past for anti-racists. In a reflection on the enduring menace of Holocaust denial, he wrote that ‘le devoir de mémoire, si fréquemment invoqué, ne consiste pas seulement à honorer les morts d'hier, mais à empêcher que d'autre innocents subissent le même sort aujourd'hui et demain’.713 For Lévy, not only was remembering an anti-racist duty, it was also conceived of as an intergenerational contract. He emphasised the important role of history and memory:

Pour tirer du passé les leçons, les avertissements nécessaires, on ne saurait s'en tenir aux incantations, à la répulsion ou au sentiment de

710 ‘Pour une pédagogie de mémoire’, Le Droit de Vivre (March-April 1994), p. 1-3.711 See Christopher C. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford, 1999). See also, by the former General Secretary of Médècins sans Frontières, Alain Destexhe, Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, trans. Alison Marschner (London, 1995). 712 ‘[T]he scars of colonialism open, letting blood flow between communities.’: Aounit, ‘Edito’, Différences (May 1994), p. 1. 713 The duty to remember, so often invoked, does not only consist of honouring the dead of yesterday, but to prevent other innocents from suffering the same fate today and tomorrow.’: Albert Lévy, ‘Le négationnisme et la mémoire’, Différences (June 1996), p. 7.

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culpabilité: il faut, le plus lucidement possible, comprendre et expliquer pourquoi et comment tout cela est arrivé.714

Notwithstanding the challenges posed by invoking the past to challenge contemporary racism, due to issues of context and the ever-changing dimensions of racism, memory remained no less important as a part of anti-racist thought and practice. Consciously or not, drawing deeply from memory cultures was an integral part of anti-racist practice; a way of ‘doing’ anti-racism. Thus remembering the past – the Holocaust or colonialism – was by no means a passive activity, done individually or collectively, it was instead a fundamental way of engaging in anti-racism and recognising the imperative of challenging contemporary racism in light of the consequences of historical racism.

‘Out of Europe whence they came…’ – Colonial memory and anti-racist music cultureThe marriage between anti-racist activism and popular culture was by no means a new phenomenon in the early 1990s. The success of anti-racist initiatives like Rock against Racism and mass movements like the Anti-Nazi League in the late 1970s both in response to racism in music – in particular, controversial comments by Eric Clapton and David Bowie – and the rising support for the National Front had rested in large part on the effective synthesis between anti-racist and anti-fascist politics, youth culture and music.715 In France, SOS Racisme followed a similar approach in the mid-1980s, building on the momentum gained by the Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme of 1983 and hosting a concert at the Place de la Concorde in Paris on 15 June 1985.716 However, a clearer cross-Channel influence of groups like Rock against Racism

714 ‘In order to draw lessons from the past, the necessary warnings, one cannot keep up with the incantations, repulsions or feelings of guilt: we must, as explicitly as possible, understand and explain why and how this has happened.’, Lévy, ‘Le négationnisme et la mémoire’, Différences (June 1996), p. 7.715 See Ian Goodyer, Crisis Music: The Cultural Politics of Rock against Racism (Manchester, 2009); Daniel Rachel, Walls come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge, 1976-1992 (London, 2017); David Renton, When we touched the Sky: The Anti-Nazi League, 1977-1981 (Cheltenham, 2006).716 Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (London, 1992), p. 63.

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can be seen in the emergence of Rock against Police which raised awareness of police and state brutality towards North Africans in France.717

In 1994, however, there was a rising interest among anti-racist publications and organisations over the appearance of highly political bands and musicians who saw music – particularly hip-hop, funk and rock – as an effective medium for social and political activism.718 The ANL was relaunched in early 1992 amid fears that, as The Times put it, the ‘followers of Adolf Hitler were making significant advances in Europe once again’.719 The founding members of the ANL, Paul Holborow, Peter Hain and Ernie Roberts, claimed upon its reformation that despite the fact that it ‘has taken Britain’s Nazis more than a decade to begin to regroup from their almost total eclipse at the hands of the Anti-Nazi League in the late 1970s’, the ANL was needed once more in the context of rising neo-Nazi activity in post-1989 Europe.720 Despite this reformation, the CARF was unconvinced that this would be an effective approach in the early 1990s, remarking that,

[T]he heyday of ‘One World’ racial harmony pop festivals and even Rock Against Racism spectaculars is over. Such events may attract huge numbers of youth to the music but they do not, any longer, inspire people towards political protest. They are safe, and the music industry has incorporated them.721

Arguing that music concerts and holding anti-racist carnivals reflected a hollowed-out and sanitised anti-racism was by no means new. While the launch of SOS Racisme had been largely (though cautiously) welcomed by the older anti-racist organisations in France, it came in for criticism for what was seen as its lack of political conviction.722 The CARF appeared to hold similar fears about the reformed ANL and its limited capacity to inspire young people to social justice and political activism in an increasingly commercialised world. But it was also a question of representation. The CARF was particularly excited by the 717 Gordon, Immigrants and Intellectuals, pp. 207-209.718 A CARF editorial claimed that music and other cultural media were not necessarily ‘traditional sites of struggle’: ‘Racism and Anti-Racism in Popular Culture’, CARF (September-October 1994), p. 2. 719 ‘Anti-Nazi group relaunched’, The Times (15 January 1992), p. 2.720 Paul Holborow, Peter Hain and Ernie Roberts, ‘Anti-Nazi League Relaunch Leaflet (1992), p. 2.721 ‘Editorial’, CARF (September-October 1994), p. 2. 722 See Jean Michel-Ollé, ‘Deux marches, c’est beaucoup: Est-ce que c’est trop?’, Differences (December 1985), pp. 6-7.

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fact that it was Asian and African-Caribbean musicians who were at the cutting edge of anti-racist music culture; ‘[T]he aggressive and passionate style of such music and the immediacy of its content are things that the establishment finds problematic’.723

The creation of a new space for anti-racist politics, occupied by a new generation of activists using hip-hop for the communication of an explicitly anti-racist and anti-fascist message excited activist groups, many of which had been involved in the first wave of cultural politics just over a decade earlier. The context for this rejuvenation of anti-racist music culture was the growth of the British National Party (BNP) and its electoral successes in the East End of London. On the 16 September 1993, Derek Beackon won thirty-four per cent of the vote in a by-election in the Millwall Ward. Despite only serving as councillor for eight months, the surprise victory elicited condemnation from across the political divide and provoked anger and fear among the large South Asian minority of Tower Hamlets.

In the autumn of 1994, CARF magazine carried an interview with the founder and vocalist of the band Fun-Da-Mental, Aki ‘Propa-Gandhi’ Nawaz. Describing Fun-Da-Mental as ‘an anti-racist band with a no nonsense attitude’, Nawaz reflected on the importance and responsibility of occupying a platform for the attention of young people as well as the satisfaction that came with irritating the BNP ‘and a lot of liberal minded people who talk about multi-culturalism but don’t understand what it means’.724 The band’s members were of African-Caribbean and South Asian descent and several members – including the vocalist – were Muslim. Indeed, the band’s name was a response to the post-Rushdie media turn towards painting Muslims and Muslim communities in Britain as fundamentalist and ‘the Other’.725

Fun-Da-Mental’s songs covered topics such as racism, cultural alienation, police violence and socio-economic inequality. The lyrics to ‘No more Fear’ expressed an assertive and combative anti-racism;

Black to basics is my politics and we’re not pacifists,we don’t talk jive, we try to survive, no more fearno more shame

723 ‘Editorial’, CARF (September-October 1994), p. 2. 724 ‘Fund-da-mentally’, CARF (September-October 1994), p. 6.725 Anandi Ramamurthy, Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movements (London, 2013), pp. 185-186.

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So ring-a-ring-a-rosey, my culture is your enemyIt doesn’t bother me so don’t treat me like a Class B citizen.I’m already on the frontline.726

This depiction of life as a young person of colour in Britain as one ‘on the frontline’ gives an impression of everyday racist violence and discrimination as commonplace. Furthermore, its lyrics highlight the continuities between an identification with Muslim identity and the language of black politics.727 The song also reflected the ‘in between’ status of a second- or third-generation South Asian or West Indian;

So tell me mister M.P., you try to represent meBack to basics, conventional politics/…But you label me immigrant, ban my family/Let fools run around beating brothers/…That’s what it’s like when you’re livin’ on the…frontline.728

The assertiveness of younger anti-racist activists in the early 1990s stemmed in part from generational frustrations. Fun-Da-Mental’s Nawaz thought that his parents’ generation had been ‘too complacent’ in the face of racism, encouraging their children to ‘hold back’ and keep their heads down when confronted by discrimination.729 The extent to which this stemmed from a younger generation’s traditional desire to set themselves apart from their parents’ or simply reflects a lack of awareness of the anti-racist activism of previous generations is not entirely clear. Nevertheless, the frustration of being caught between two different worlds – the religious and cultural traditions of their first-generation migrant parents and the western, secular, commercial and racialised societies in which their children were raised – are in evidence through the assertiveness and, at times, outright aggression of the younger generation of anti-racist activists.

726 Fun-Da-Mental, ‘No More Fear’, in ‘Seize the Time’ (1994): Mammoth Records.727 Ramamurthy, Black Star, p. 190. 728 Ibid.729 ‘Fun-da-mentally’, CARF, p. 7.

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Fun-Da-Mental’s songs also addressed Britain’s imperial legacy and its enduring consequences. The lyrics of ‘English Breakfast’ unflinchingly referred to Britain’s history of colonial violence and exploitation;

Came and came then they raped and maimed/stole my land but here comes the band/…they lived on my land and never gave rent/never gave cents or pounds or pence’.730

The song reaches a pitch with its closing lines ‘Out of Europe whence they came/Demons and devils in a land of gods/hunting the prize like hungry dogs/In the British Museum is where you can see ‘em/The bones of African human beings’.731 As artists and anti-racist actors, Fun-Da-Mental saw themselves – as young representatives of their own ethnic/cultural communities - as the guardians of the ‘true’ memory of Britain’s imperial past; one which they saw as having been repressed and erased from wider public consciousness. By connecting their own localised and lived experiences of racism in England to the global colonial past and making explicit the living links between the past and present, anti-racist music could serve - as one scholar has put it – as a ‘vehicle for and part of political liberation and postcolonial justice’.732

In the interview with the CARF, Nawaz outlined his conviction that the historical reality of colonialism necessitated some form of reparation or restoration:

As new generations start learning about history it creates anger and you just say ‘why’, and you are going to say ‘why’ until you know that something’s being done about it. There has to be some form of payback – imperialism and colonialism is all part of racism and until that is addressed, we have to get a lot harder, especially from a black perspective – even just from a human perspective.733

Racism was not just something that came out of nowhere but was a phenomenon deeply rooted in Britain’s colonial past and intimately woven into 730 Fun-Da-Mental, ‘English Breakfast’ in ‘Seize the Time’ (1994): Mammoth Records. 731 Ibid. 732 Edward E. Curtis IV, The Call of Bilal: Islam in the African Diaspora (North Carolina, 2014), p. 81. 733 ‘Fun-da-mentally’, CARF, p. 7.

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its national identity. In using music to highlight the interconnected dynamic between the history and memory of colonialism and contemporary racism, Fun-Da-Mental was able to address difficult subjects in an accessible though subversive manner.

Searchlight, Empire and National Identity

Since its inception in 1975, Searchlight magazine had been consistent in its support for racialised and post-colonial minorities in Britain and frequently expressed its solidarity with them in the face of racism. However, despite the distinctly post-colonial dimension of contemporary racism and its targets, Searchlight had remarkably little to say about the legacy of Britain’s colonial past and its enduring relevance to the existence of racism in the 1980s and 1990s. There was a real absence of reflection on the continuities between colonial and post-colonial racism in late twentieth-century Britain. While this can largely be accounted for with reference to the dominance of Searchlight’s anti-fascist identity and memory culture, Searchlight’s distinctly universalist approach to anti-racism and anti-fascism is also key to understanding this absence. Unlike other anti-racist publications in Britain like Race & Class or Race Today, Searchlight had little time for what it perceived as narrowly construed identities – whether they were ethnic, cultural or political. There was an acute suspicion regarding what was beginning to be described as ‘identity politics’. Such suspicions rose to the fore following the creation in November 1991 of the Anti-Racist Alliance (ARA) which, upon its emergence, boasted considerable political and trade union support. Despite initial confusion about the identity or identities of the ARA’s leadership, it soon transpired that the veteran anti-racist activist and campaigner for the Labour Party’s Black Sections in the early 1980s, Marc Wadsworth, was at the organisation’s helm. The ARA committed itself to fighting racism and fascism on the basis of the ‘most crucial alliance…between Black and minority communities’.734 Furthermore, the ARA prioritised black self-organisation and leadership.735 Searchlight was anxious that the emergence of the ARA was simply the latest development in the fragmentation of anti-racism in Britain. While asserting its belief that people of colour should be ‘in the lead in the struggle against racism 734 Marc Wadsworth, ‘Letter: Alarm Bells across Europe’, The Guardian (30 March 1992). 735 Copsey, Anti-fascism in Britain, pp. 167-168.

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– after all in this country they are its main victims’, Searchlight nevertheless hoped that this would not come at the expense of broader ‘anti-racist and anti-fascist unity’.736 This desire for a united front against racism and fascism depended on seeing anti-racism and anti-fascism as two distinct but ultimately entwined struggles. This was most clearly stated in its November 1995 issue when Searchlight reaffirmed its commitment to a broad-based anti-racist movement unencumbered by identity politics:

Those who started Searchlight and those who have joined them over the years have consciously chosen to fight two particular evils: racism and fascism. The Searchlight team come from the left, right and centre of the British political spectrum…We have no time for anti-fascist and anti-racist groups that do not wish to unite anti-racists in a broad front or that have hidden agendas for the political groups for which they act as a front. We do not seek solutions in revolutions that offer gulags instead of death camps. We do not believe in forming a rainbow coalition of black people, gays and the poor, because we do not believe these groups are best served by being marginalised from the rest of society. Searchlight believes that racism and fascism can only be fought by all sections of the community working together.737

Despite this disavowal of political partisanship, it rings rather hollow when compared to Searchlight’s previous statements on the importance of Britain’s left-wing anti-fascist tradition – a tradition within which Searchlight self-consciously positioned itself. While Searchlight was not affiliated with any political party, its origins and support lay firmly within the labour movement more broadly. By the mid-1990s, however, Searchlight continued to be frustrated by what it saw as ongoing hindrances to the formation of an anti-fascist and anti-racist broad front. This was a striking statement of Searchlight’s own universalist conception of anti-racism and anti-fascism. It had long referred to racism and fascism as ‘twin evils’738. Neither could be understood or resisted in isolation of the other and the two phenomena were intimately entwined: anti-racism and anti-fascism went hand-in-hand.

736 ‘Editorial’, Searchlight (January 1992), p. 2; ‘Editorial’, Searchlight (December 1991), p. 2. 737 ‘Editorial’, Searchlight (November 1995), p. 2. 738 See ‘Editorial’, Searchlight (June 1992); ‘Major Problems for 1993’, Searchlight (January 1993), p. 2; and, ‘Never Forget’, Searchlight (May 1995), p. 2.

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However, Searchlight’s claim on the moral high ground of universalism had been seriously problematised in 1990 when the CARF split from its host publication arguing that it had veered away from Ludmer’s legacy of fighting racism and fascism together.739 Indeed, one of CARF’s chief frustrations had been what it saw as Searchlight’s excessive focus on the fight against antisemitism at the expense of challenging anti-black racism.740 In its departing letter to Searchlight the CARF stated its position that

the fight against fascism today has to involve both the fight against anti-Semitism and the fight against anti-black racism…While not detracting one iota from your fight against anti-Semitism, we also believe that the fight against anti-black racism, and particularly anti-Arab racism, claims as much attention as the fight against anti-Semitism.741

The CARF, like Searchlight, continued to see anti-racism and anti-fascism as distinct but united struggles and rejected what it viewed as Searchlight’s ‘increasingly…one-pronged approach’ interpreting ‘the fight against racism and fascism as the fight against anti-Semitism in the first instance’.742 When the CARF formally split from Searchlight in late 1990, Searchlight appeared to respond indirectly to the CARF’s criticisms by referring to racism and antisemitism as ‘twin evils’ which ‘must be resisted whether they be racist attacks on the black community, the intimidation of Jewish students or the growing influence of neo-nazi youth groups on our young people’.743 The editorial of November 1995 thus bore a striking resemblance to the universalist outlook of organisations such as the LICRA. Though in the absence of a universalism underpinned by the founding principles of the French Republic, Searchlight’s universalism was articulated in terms of anti-racist and anti-fascist unity. The residual universalism of twentieth-century left wing political thought and rhetoric is detectable in Searchlight’s rejection of the politics of identity. The personal experiences of Ludmer and Gables in post-war British communist circles offers some explanation for Searchlight magazine’s wariness

739 Upon Ludmer’s death in May 1981 and successive anniversaries, readers of Searchlight were regularly reminded of his principle of teaching anti-fascism to antiracists and antiracism to anti-fascists. See ‘1975 to 1995: 20 Fighting Years’, Searchlight (February 1995), p. 2. 740 Copsey, Anti-fascism in Britain, p. 166. 741 ‘CARF is Back’, CARF (February-March 1991), p. 2. 742 Ibid., p. 2. 743 ‘Editorial’, Searchlight (November 1990), p. 2.

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towards internecine splits within the British anti-fascist and anti-racist movement.744

Searchlight’s desire to see a united and broad-based anti-racist movement in Britain nevertheless limited its understanding of the colonial dimension and continuities of contemporary racism. The absence of references to Britain’s colonial past or indeed the influence of its legacies on the present mirrored the amnesia of British society at large. Furthermore, one of the major limitations of Searchlight’s anti-fascist memory culture – indeed, that of the anti-fascist movement as a whole – was its ostensible ambivalence towards Britain’s colonial past and its surrounding memory. The strength of the transmission of Holocaust and anti-fascist memory in Searchlight’s publication and its activism left little space for the acknowledgement of Britain’s colonial past and its centrality to contemporary racism in the street and of the state.

Of all events, it was the French victory in the 1998 World Cup which prompted a serious though short-lived reflection on and engagement with Britain’s imperial past. Searchlight commended the multi-ethnic and inclusive French world cup team and expressed optimism that it marked ‘a new dawn in French society, one that was inclusive for all its inhabitants’.745 The wave of euphoria and enthusiasm across France in the immediate aftermath of France’s victory over Brazil on 12 July 1998 had indeed been interpreted by many intellectuals and politician as an emphatic riposte to racism.746 The president of SOS Racisme, Fodé Sylla, viewed France’s victory as a pivotal moment after years of persistent anti-racist activism.747 The support behind the diverse French team was seen as undercutting support for the Front National and their exclusivist and racist rhetoric.748 Furthermore, it was contrasted with what Searchlight saw as the failure to foster a positive and inclusive English identity. At the height of ‘Cool Britannia’, it is striking that Searchlight looked to the sporting triumph of another ex-imperial nation – which resolutely rejected the Anglo-Saxon multicultural model - for a positive example of multiculturalism. It is also revealing that when the subjects of empire and colonialism were raised,

744 Copsey, Anti-fascism in Britain, p. 121. 745 ‘Time for Engagement’, Searchlight (August 1998), p.2. 746 Laurent Dubois, Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (London, 2010), p. 163. 747 Florence Couret and Emmanuelle Reju, ‘Le Mondial vaux dix ans de campagne antiraciste’, La Croix (15 July 1998), p. 7.748 Dubois, Soccer Empire, p. 163.

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it was not precisely in relation to contemporary racism in 1990s Britain but to anxieties over English identity:

For too long the anti-fascist and anti-racist movements have neglected the importance of identity and the need to belong. English history is so synonymous with aggressive imperialism and thoughts of racial superiority that the need for identity has not only been ignored but also rejected.749

The repeated attempts of the far-right to claim the St George’s flag for their own as a deliberate expression of Englishness as whiteness was also a key factor in the previous anti-racist and anti-fascist ‘rejection’ of questions about Englishness. The push towards devolution and ostensible ‘decline of the Union’ also served as a crucial stimulus for reflections on the nature of British and English identity.750

The World Cup, devolution and questions about identity as Britain prepared to enter the new millennium set the context for Searchlight’s appeal to the anti-racist and anti-fascist left to ‘reassess our relationship with black and white communities in areas where racial tensions are strong’.751 In a highly self-reflective editorial, Gerry Gable acknowledged that Searchlight and the broader movement had made mistakes by failing to get to know the communities most affected by racism and parachuting in ‘from outside, believing that we know best’ instead of ‘work[ing] from within and, more importantly, alongside the communities’. This reflection was stimulated, in part, by the imminent closure of the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in April 1993 an event which quickly garnered media and public attention, raising questions regarding the prevalence of ‘institutional racism’ in British police forces and liberal institutions to the surface of public debate.752 Searchlight’s call for a new engagement was thus tied into contemporary questions about the pervasiveness of racism in British society and was implicitly directed at the white anti-racist left. It also marked an acknowledgement with its failures over the decades to appreciate the highly particular struggles, lived experiences and autonomous

749 Ibid., p. 2. 750 ‘Time for Engagement’, Searchlight (August 1998), p. 2. 751 Ibid., p.2. 752 Edward Pilkington, ‘Mandela meets family of London stabbing victim’, The Guardian, 7 May 1993. See also, Joseph Harker, ‘Protest is fine but where’s progress?’, The Guardian, 14 May 1993: ‘Hundreds mourn stabbed teenager, Stephen Lawrence’, The Times, 19 June 1993.

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achievements of people of colour and black self-organisation. Yet curiously, as part of this new engagement, Searchlight also called for a greater level of engagement with ‘the white population’ of areas in which ethnic tensions were high. This was an appeal to

address issues of white ethnicity, a need to belong and English culture. The example of France shows that shared experiences can bond a nation that many had written off as inextricably split. While this new togetherness in France is unlikely to last without more fundamental changes in society, it does show that human behaviour and opinions are constantly fluid and open to change. The time for a new engagement in Britain is now.753

Such a statement bore striking similarities to New Labour’s vision of British identity as outlined by Tony Blair two years before becoming Prime Minister. In a speech that sought to articulate a definition of Britishness fit for the new millennium, Blair called for the setting aside of ‘old prejudices’ and for a ‘new spirit in the nation based on working together, unity, solidarity, partnership. One Britain. That is the patriotism of the future’.754 While it avoided reference to questions of ‘race’ and racism in contemporary British society and focused instead on appeals to abandoning older political divisions – a message directed at internal opponents of the New Labour project as much as those outside of the party - it nevertheless captured an inclusive and progressive vision of Britain underpinned by an ‘enlightened patriotism’.755 However, missing in the broader debates about British national identity as the Blair government forged ahead with decentralisation and devolution was a reckoning with Britain’s imperial and colonial legacy. The fact that this was mirrored in an avowedly anti-racist publication such as Searchlight was revealing of just how large a blind-spot continued to hamper contemporary debates about national identity, diversity and multiculturalism.

In August 2000, under the new editorial team of Nick Lowles and Steve Silver, Searchlight’s editorial expressed concern that Holocaust memory and its meaning had become too exclusive. While the editorial acknowledged the

753 Ibid., p. 2. 754 Tony Blair, ‘Leader’s speech, Brighton 1995’: http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=201 [Last accessed: 28/07/2019].755 Stephen Driver and Luke Martell, Blair’s Britain (Cambridge, 2002), p. 149.

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unique nature of the Holocaust, it also expressed concern that its status was occluding the memory of other historical acts of racist violence: ‘it is not only the Holocaust that needs to be remembered but all those who have suffered in the name of racism and fascism’.756 The Holocaust, having become the fundamental European historical memory of the twentieth century, left – it was feared - little space for the memory of other racisms. This prompted an acknowledgement in Searchlight of the legacies of colonialism. While arguing that ‘it is right that the Holocaust is given a prominent place in history’, the editorial sought to remind Searchlight readers that ‘[t]he imperialist powers carried out the most heinous racist crimes as they divided up the globe, and the legacy of imperialism continues to scar international and race relations today’.757 The implicit suggestions was that this legacy was being ignored or marginalised by the consensual memory of the Holocaust. This was a rare reference to the history and legacy of colonialism in the pages of Searchlight.

One of the problems of over-reliance on historical memory and using past examples to mobilise contemporary activists against racism was (and remains) the challenge this can pose to understanding racism in the present on its own terms. If, as Stuart Hall frequently pointed out, racism is defined by its fluidity and ability to adapt to and articulate itself within different specific historical, cultural and socio-political contexts then the historical memory of the Holocaust or colonialism can surely only take one so far in effectively challenging contemporary racism.758 This is by no means a new observation: Paul Gilroy, for example, criticised the heavily anti-fascist focus of publications such as Searchlight which, in his view, came at the expense not just of acknowledging Britain’s colonial legacy but the lived experiences of racism among Britain’s postcolonial communities.759 Anti-racist movements were usually divided due to disagreements over understandings of racism, anti-racist priorities and strategy.

What conclusions can be drawn from Searchlight’s omission of colonial memory? On the one hand, it could be argued that the anti-racist magazine was largely representative of wider societal attitudes towards Britain’s imperial and

756 Nick Lowles and Steve Silver, ‘Remembering all the victims of racism and fascism’, Searchlight (August 2000), p. 3.757 Ibid., p. 3. 758 Hall, ‘Racism and Reaction, 1978’, in Davison, Featherstone, Rustin and Schwarz (eds.), Selected Political Writings, p. 151. 759 Gilroy, ‘There ain’t no black in the Union Jack’, p. 119.

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colonial past. Public responses to this history ranged, in Andrew Thompson’s words, ambiguously across ‘feelings of pride, shame, anger and guilt’.760 While Searchlight had an overwhelmingly negative view of Britain and Europe’s history of empire and ‘aggressive imperialism’761, there was little engagement with this history and, more strikingly, little reflection on the implications of this complex history on the contemporary reality of racism in post-colonial Britain. On the other hand, the omission of colonial memory or references to Britain’s imperial past may, in the end, be more revealing of the strength and dominance of an anti-fascist memory culture which left little space for the incorporation of colonial memory.

‘M é moire, vigilance, p é dagogie’: 762 Anti-racist memory at the close of the twentieth century

The 1990s was a significant decade of historical and institutional anniversaries for the MRAP, LICRA and Searchlight. Such anniversaries prompted reflection among anti-racists about their own activist heritage as well as directions for the future. In December 1997, the LICRA celebrated seventy years since its founding by asserting that its anti-racist priorities on the approach to the millennium were ‘mémoire, vigilance, pédagogie’.763 Over the course of the 1990s, memory was increasingly presented as a means of remaining vigilant and as a pedagogical tool. The MRAP shared with the LICRA a belief in the moral and pedagogical value of both History and Memory. For Jean Pierre-Bloch ‘la mémoire historique reste le fondement de son action pédagogique’.764 This echoed Mouloud Aounit’s words some years before when he argued that ‘la mobilisation des antiracistes sur les non-lieux de la mémoire est un acte pédagogique indispensable’.765 Searchlight also exhorted its readers and activists to remember the past. Closely following the trial of Paul Touvier,

760 Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the mid-nineteenth century (Harlow, 2005), p. 236. 761 Gerry Gable, ‘Time for Engagement’, Searchlight (August 1998), p. 2. 762 Pierre Aidenbaum, ’70 ans après’, Le Droit de Vivre (December 1997-January 1998), p. 5. 763 Aidenbaum, ’70 ans après’, Le Droit de Vivre, p. 5. 764 ‘Historical memory remains the foundation of its [the LICRA’s] pedagogical activism’: Jean Pierre-Bloch, ‘Amorcer un tournant historique’, Le Droit de Vivre (November/December 1994-January 1995), p. 3. 765 Aounit, ‘La mémoire ou la honte’, Différences, p. 1.

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Searchlight’s anonymous French correspondent concluded a report on developments of the trial by commenting that ‘the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. It is our collective responsibility to remain vigilant and remember the significance’.766 The LICRA, the MRAP and Searchlight asserted, in various ways, the ‘responsibility’, ‘pedagogical’ necessity and value of remembering. Remembering the past was increasingly presented as a moral imperative.

The concept of ‘le devoir de mémoire’ helped anti-racists connect the racism of the present with the racism of the past and allowed activists to situate themselves within a longer historical tradition of resistance. There was a significant proliferation of the use of the phrase in the 1990s and it was overwhelmingly with reference to the Holocaust.767 By the middle of the decade, however, familiar tropes and concepts associated with remembering the Holocaust were starting to be applied by some academics and anti-racists to France’s colonial (mis)memory. The anti-racist director and author, Mehdi Lallaoui wrote in Libération on 8 May 1995 – the fiftieth anniversary of the formal end of the Second World War in Europe – condemning remembrance of the Allied victory at the expense of the memory of the Sétif massacre of the same date and called for a ‘devoir de mémoire’ for Sétif and the colonial legacy of the French republic.768 The application of a phrase largely used with reference to the memory of the Holocaust to the memory of colonial violence reflected the increasing encounters between Holocaust and colonial memory.

However, questions have been raised about the efficacy and even appropriateness of such an approach to remembering the past. The philosopher Emmanuel Kattan, for instance, has explored the ethical implications of remembering as a pedagogical and preventative function, especially in the context of French memories of Vichy and the Holocaust.769 Despite the important function that Holocaust memory can play in raising public awareness of contemporary racism and xenophobia, the danger of remembering in this way can, according to Kattan, contribute to memory becoming little more than a ‘police d’assurance’ against such a crime happening again. The anti-racist

766 French correspondent, ‘Touvier gets life, but the questions remain’, Searchlight (June 1994), p. 16. 767 Sébastian Ledoux, Le devoir de mémoire: Une formule et son histoire (Paris, 2015), p. 12. 768 Mehdi Lallaoui, ‘Sétif, 8 mai 1945, le devoir de mémoire’, Libération (8 May 1995): https://www.liberation.fr/tribune/1995/05/08/setif-8-mai-1945-le-devoir-de-memoire_133927 [Last accessed: 09/07/2019]. 769 See Emmanuel Kattan, Penser le devoir de mémoire (Paris, 2002).

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slogan ‘plus jamais’ is a pithy summary of this rhetoric of vigilance. However, this, Kattan warns, could lead to – indeed has led to – the memory of the Holocaust and Nazism being invoked like an incantation or magic spell, preventing serious engagement with the moral and social implications of its usage.770 While Kattan was writing about Holocaust remembrance in broader terms – at the level of official commemorations of the state, public memory and local memory – much of his argument can be applied to anti-racist memory. For antiracists on both sides of the Channel, especially the LICRA and Searchlight, the memory of the Holocaust had long served as a ‘mémoire-garde-fou’.771 The prophylactic quality of the LICRA’s Holocaust memory was particularly prevalent in 1994 when Pierre-Bloch made an appeal to the younger members of the LICRA, reminding them that the organisation consisted of ‘des survivants de la Shoah, des Résistants et des ‘Justes’’.772 He urged young people to recognise that while modernity, technology, ideology and racism made the Holocaust possible, it is the responsibility of anti-racists and ‘hommes et femmes de coeur’ to resist the barbarism of racism ‘hier, aujourd’hui et demain’.773 The memory of historical racism enabled antiracists to navigate the fluid dynamics of racism as it adapted to different contexts. It also helped anti-racists to find their bearings in a post-Holocaust and post-colonial Europe which was fast approaching the new millennium.

The end of the twentieth century was indeed an appropriate moment for reflection. Aounit saw the MRAP’s fiftieth anniversary as ‘un précieux moment d’évaluation’.774 Reflecting on the twentieth century and its ills, Aounit presented the history of the MRAP as a light in the dark, illuminating the fact that ‘la force des convictions et de l’éngagement individuel contre l’injustice permettent detisser les conditions de la conquête des droits de l’homme’.775 The LICRA, MRAP, Race & Class and Searchlight and their diverse understandings of racism and anti-racism were all firmly rooted in the twentieth-century experience. Exhorting their members, activists and wider society to remember the Holocaust and the atrocities and legacy of European colonialism was nothing new. However, there appeared to be a distinctly millenarian quality to such appeals towards the end of the 1990s. While this was due, in part, to the 770 Kattan, Penser le devoir de mémoire, p. 75. 771 Ibid, p. 73.772 Pour une pédagogie de mémoire’, Le Droit de Vivre (March-April 1994), p. 1.773Le Droit de Vivre (March-April 1994), p. 1.774 Mouloud Aounit, ‘Éditorial’, Différences (January 2000), p. 9.775 Ibid, p. 9.

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fact that the twentieth century was coming to a close, it also spoke to anxieties among senior members of such organisations that the younger generation(s) were indifferent to or ignorant of recent history. Concerns were expressed about the limits of memory transmission and the traditional rituals through which memory was passed on. An episode which illustrated such anxieties came in 1994, when the LICRA expressed reservations about the release of Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List but nevertheless encouraged young people to see the film as it might be a more effective way for them to learn about the Holocaust despite the fact that the LICRA had long campaigned for Holocaust education.776

During the late 1990s, more space was given to reflecting on the history of racism, anti-racism and resistance throughout the past century. The LICRA, MRAP and Searchlight marked their own anniversaries. At the end of 1997, the LICRA celebrated seventy years of anti-racist activism; in May 1999, the MRAP marked its fiftieth anniversary; and, in June 2000, Searchlight published its three-hundredth issue.777 However, these anniversaries were not just about the past achievements and struggles of these organisations. They also represented a moment in which to think about anti-racism’s future. The 1990s was a period of renewal for anti-racist movements in Britain and France. Transformations in communication technology, print media, the rise of the internet and the need to engage with the younger generation in a dynamic and interactive way resulted in some significant changes. Adapting to this new media landscape and the demands of an increasingly globalised and interconnected world was therefore a priority for anti-racism during this period.

In September 1994, after six decades of its publication in newspaper format, a new-look Le Droit de Vivre appeared. Inside its glossy pages and magazine-like content, Jean Pierre-Bloch acknowledged the number of readers who, in recent months, had been calling for a serious overhaul to the LICRA’s media. Bloch therefore introduced ‘un nouveau Droit de Vivre, plus jeune, plus dynamique, mieux lisible’.778 The updating of traditional forms of anti-racist media also coincided with a changing of the anti-racist guard on both sides of the Channel. Pierre-Bloch stood down as President of the LICRA in 1993 after two decades, signalling the transmission of leadership from generation to 776 Le Droit de Vivre (March-April 1994), p. 1. 777 See Le Droit de Vivre (Dec 1997-Jan 1998); Différences (May 1999); and, Searchlight (June 2000). 778 Jean-Pierre Bloch, ‘Aux lecteurs’, Le Droit de Vivre (September-October 1994), p. 3.

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another. He died at the age of 94 on 17 March 1999.779 A special edition of Le Droit de Vivre was released upon his death and the tribute paid to Pierre-Bloch by his successor Patrick Gaubert highlighted the continuity in the LICRA’s highly particular historical memory culture, weaving the life of Pierre-Bloch into the history of Europe’s twentieth century.780 Emphasising the highly personal and paternal dimension Pierre-Bloch brought to his leadership and membership of the LICRA, Gaubert declared that ‘je suis comme beaucoup de militants, un enfant de Jean’.781 In the same year, Searchlight also announced major changes to its publication and editorial team. From March, Searchlight contained more pages, material and the contribution of academics and experts to its pages under the dual editorship of Nick Lowles and Steve Silver. Gable stood down as editor after twenty-five years at the helm leaving readers with the assessment that the anti-racist and anti-fascist movement as the ‘finest cause for humankind.782

This was a time of transition. It prompted reflections on how a tradition of resistance – rooted in and profoundly moulded by the twentieth century experience – could endure and be remade for the twenty-first century. As Nick Lowles and Steve Silver said in their first editorial in 1999, Searchlight had to recognise ‘that the nature of racism and fascism in Britain today has changed since Searchlight was born’ and that ‘we have looked afresh at the needs of those who oppose racism and fascism and have redesigned and expanded the magazine accordingly’.783 As such, succeeding issues carried articles and essays from younger experts and established scholars of contemporary and twentieth-century fascism and racism such as David Renton and Tony Kushner. Indeed, the contributions of historians to Searchlight magazine at the turn of the millennium was reflective of a broader desire to re-examine and reappraise the anti-racist and anti-fascist legacies of the twentieth century.

As the twenty-first century dawned, Mouloud Aounit remarked on the fact that ‘les vieux démons’ of the twentieth century remained alive and well.

779 Jean-Dominique Merchet, ‘Décès de Jean Pierre-Bloch’, Libération, 18 March 1999. 780 Patrick Gaubert, ‘Orphelins’, Le Droit de Vivre (April 1999), p. 5. 781 ‘I am like many activists, a child of Jean’: Gaubert, Le Droit de Vivre (April 1999), p. 5. 782 Showing an unwavering commitment to this cause, Gable continues to play an instrumental role in the publication of Searchlight little over twenty years later. Gerry Gable, ‘Adieu, but not farewell’, Searchlight (February 1999), p. 24. 783 Steve Silver and Nick Lowles, ‘Searchlight still Shining’, Searchlight (March 1999), p. 22.

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Despite this, he called upon readers and the MRAP to remember the twentieth century and to study the past the better to fight for ‘fraternité et l’égalité’ in the present and in the future.784 As the world passed from one troubled century into another, the twentieth-century would remain as alive in the minds of anti-racists as ever. Just as it had done in the 1980s and 1990s, the twentieth century served as something of a moral and historical guide neither offering lessons nor concealing them. For anti-racists, especially those whose lives had been profoundly shaped by the ruptures and upheavals of the twentieth century, activism was about warning against and preventing the past from recurring again.

Conclusion

Michael Rothberg observed that the violence of European colonialism was a foreshadowing of the Holocaust, with the shadow of the Holocaust reflected back onto the legacy of colonial violence.785 While anti-racists did not always make this connection explicit, however, it is difficult not to see that within the contours of anti-racist memory, Holocaust and colonial memories were operating less in the 1990s in two separate spheres but were intersecting in various ways. Shortly before his death in 2014, Stuart Hall observed that

colonialism was founded on, and continues to work, not through its gifts but through the conquest of land and resources, the violent exploitation of labour, the imposition of foreign rule, the subjugation of peoples and the destruction and marginalization of those cultural traditions which are perceived as inimical to colonial authority. Its intervention broke up historic old civilizations. It represents one of the most far-reaching, brutal ruptures in modern history, equivalent in depth to the Holocaust, although – surprisingly? – this is a comparison which is not often made.786

Such sentiments have also been echoed by historians of the Holocaust and colonialism.787 Comparisons were, however, starting to be made by anti-racist

784 Mouloud Aounit, ‘Éditorial’, Différences (January 2000), p. 9. 785 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory), p. 64. 786 Stuart Hall with Bill Schwarz, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands (London, 2017), p. 21. 787 Tom Lawson, ‘The Holocaust and Colonial Genocide at the Imperial War Museum’, in Sharples and Jensen (eds.), Britain and the Holocaust, p. 160.

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activists in the 1990s. Such historical connections have been made by intellectuals and academics, however, they have yet to filter into popular understandings these inter-related histories. Instead, the binary understanding of imperial history as ‘metropole/colony’ (or, to put it more crudely, ‘here/over there’), which has been responsible for the marginalisation of colonial history, voices and experience, has also been applied to popular understandings of European colonialism and the European Holocaust. Neither events or processes operated in isolation of the other. The Holocaust was, to a significant degree, the application of colonial methods of population transfer, labour exploitation and ethnic cleansing to Europe. Colonialism was practiced by Europeans against fellow Europeans. But this was a result of centuries of European colonial practices in Africa, South Asia and the Americas.

Some anti-racists in the 1990s were ahead of the curve in drawing connections between the Holocaust and European colonialism. On the one hand, the 1990s was a period in which there was greater space for anti-racist Holocaust memory to prise open, tease out and inform colonial memory in different ways. It has been seen how Lévy expressed his hopes for a greater engagement between the two memory spheres and for France’s complex colonial legacy to be addressed in a similar way to the country’s legacy of collaboration. On the other hand, there were significant contextual differences and time lapses between the developing spheres of memory. While anti-racists on both sides of the Channel shared some common points of historical reference which suggested a broader European anti-racist memory culture, they were also contingent upon the highly particular national contexts in which the historical memory of empire and colonialism operated. More research is needed on anti-racist memory culture in the 1990s which would be aided by a move towards historicising the 1990s.

By virtue of being an anti-racist, history and memory could not be understood or received passively. It required consistent engagement. It was not enough simply to say ‘Never Again’ and recite the litany of historic atrocities and injustices. It involved placing oneself, individually and collectively, in the liminal space of the present between past and future. The appeal to history and memory’s innately pedagogical function, in that it had something to teach the present, was an acknowledgement of this fact. The 1990s saw the tentative

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beginnings of a convergence of Holocaust and colonial memory among anti-racists which deepened their own engagement with the struggle against racism.

Conclusion

In January 2001, as Britain was preparing to mark its very first Holocaust Memorial Day, Searchlight co-editor, Steve Silvers, wrote that learning about the Holocaust and guarding its memory was ‘essential for combating fascism, racism and antisemitism’.788 The following month, the MRAP issued a statement in Différences marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.789 The statement reaffirmed the MRAP’s commitment to ‘truth and memory’ which had lain at the very heart of organisation’s vocation since its founding over half a century ago. The statement concluded with that well-worn but no less resonant

788 Steve Silver, ‘Final Solution’, Searchlight (January 2001), p. 11. 789 ‘Déclaration du conseil national du MRAP: 27 janvier 2001’, Différences (February 2001), p. 12.

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slogan: ‘Plus jamais ça’.790 On both sides of the Channel, the Holocaust had by the dawn of the twenty-first century become a permanent fixture on the landscape of national and West European memory. Despite Britain and France’s divergent historical experiences in relation to the Holocaust and its development, the systematic murder of six million European Jews by the Third Reich had become the event around which national historical memories of the Second World War (indeed, of Europe’s twentieth-century experience) revolved. This was, of course, nothing new for anti-racists. Holocaust memory had been a key component of anti-racist thought and practice for decades. This stood in sharp contrast to the destinies of colonial memory in France and Britain. Later in 2001, memory activists and anti-racists marked the fortieth anniversary of the 17 October 1961 massacre in France. Over the course of the late 1980s, the thorny politics of colonial memory was steadily moving to the centre of French national and political discourse and the 2001 anniversary marked ‘the high point of memory activism’.791 Four years later, in 2005, colonial memory would rise to the surface of public awareness in spectacular fashion, triggering a ‘guerre des mémoires’ over the legacy of France’s imperial past and its centrality to the Republic’s twentieth-century experience. North of the Channel, however, 2002 saw the opening of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol. The fragmentary nature of the museum’s exhibits mirrored the highly fragmented and contested nature of the country’s colonial memory.792

By the end of the decade, the museum had closed its doors to the public due to a lack of funding. The fate of a national museum dedicated to the history of the British imperial project reflected to a significant degree the lack of serious engagement with Britain’s imperial past. Despite these later developments, the memory activism of anti-racists on either side of the Channel did not end with the close of the twentieth century.

In the introduction to Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (2008), Tony Judt argued that the twentieth century was in danger of becoming a ‘moral memory palace: a pedagogically serviceable Chamber of Historical Horrors whose way stations are labelled “Munich” or “Pearl Harbour”, “Auschwitz” or “Gulag”’. Such a view of the twentieth century

790 Ibid., p. 12. 791 House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, p. 328.792 Corinna McLeod, ‘Negotiating and national memory: the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum’, in African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 2:2 (July 2009), p. 157.

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only serves to offer comfort to the inhabitants of the twenty-first century. Judt continues,

The problem is the message: that all of that is now behind us, that its meaning is clear, and that we may now advance – unencumbered by past errors – into a different and better era.793

As the twentieth century ended, anti-racists in Britain and France challenged the widespread moral and historical complacency Judt himself so neatly described and warned against. Anti-racists did not evoke the spectres of the past – the ‘way stations’ of colonial and post-colonial racism, the Holocaust and legacy of European antisemitism – as a way of showing how far Europe and Europeans had come. The past was rather a living reminder of that which had come to pass and could well come to pass once more. Indeed, the murderous frenzies of ethnic cleansing during the conflicts in former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda in the final decade of a century which had seen the invention of terms such as ‘genocide’ demonstrated all too starkly the necessity of an anti-racism that drew from a deep well of historical memory.

At the dawn of the 1980s, Holocaust memory already played a powerful role in anti-racism on both sides of the Channel. The bombing outside of the rue Copernic synagogue in October 1980 and the attack on the rue des Rosiers in August 1982 and, in Britain, far-right racist violence in the 1970s and early 1980s naturally caused ripples in the anti-racist memory cultures of the 1930s and 1940s. Holocaust memory was, in many respects, the default point of historical and memorial reference. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the strength and near ubiquitous presence of anti-racist Holocaust memory tended to eclipse colonial memory. In the cases of Searchlight and the LICRA, for example, there was scarcely any reference to Britain and France’s respective imperial histories and the relevance of these to contemporary racism against post-colonial minorities. This was ultimately due to Searchlight’s anti-fascist anti-racism – influenced by the example set by Maurice Ludmer - which lent itself more easily to the invocation of the memory of interwar fascism, the Second World War and the Holocaust than it did to colonial memory. The magazine’s Holocaust memory culture and its transmission was simply stronger. In the LICRA’s case, the organisation’s deep roots in the French and European

793 Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (London, 2008), p. 4.

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Jewish community and its experience of interwar antisemitism and the Holocaust remained at the very heart of its institutional identity in the closing decades of the twentieth century. By contrast, the MRAP and post-colonial intellectuals and activists such as Bouamama, Hall and Sivanandan, were much more proactive in their activist and intellectual efforts to show how the colonial past bled into the post-colonial present.

The assault on anti-racism in Britain over the course of the 1980s also addressed historical memory cultures of the past. In particular, anti-anti-racists like Roger Scruton criticised anti-racist interpretations of Britain’s imperial past and its post-colonial present accusing activists of squeamishness and engaging in a subversive plot to undermine Britain’s historical and cultural inheritance.794

By the end of the 1980s, the resurgence of republicanism as an intellectual current in French political culture and events such as the Rushdie affair and l’affaire du foulard over the course of 1989 brought France’s post-colonial condition to the forefront of public debate. It was in this context that intellectuals such as Pierre-André Taguieff reflected on the limitations of ‘antiracisme commémoratif’.795 While these debates took place within national boundaries and seldom addressed the broader and transnational significance of racism and anti-racism, the dawn of the 1990s nevertheless heralded a moment of expansion for anti-racist horizons. Anti-racists underwent a distinct ‘European turn’. This is not to say that British and French anti-racists were ignorant of or uninterested in affairs abroad: the anti-apartheid movement and the LICRA’s frequent mobilisations in support of Jews in the Soviet Union demonstrated that anti-racism continued to exhibit an internationalist outlook.796 However, the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War saw anti-racists on both sides of Channel self-consciously situating their struggles within a transnational, European, even global context. This was largely a response to the acceleration of globalisation in the wake of the Cold War. However, it was also a recognition of the necessity of transposing the fight

794 See Savery, ‘Anti-Racism as Witchcraft’, The Salisbury Review (July 1985), p. 42: see also, Scruton, ‘Editorial’, The Salisbury Review (December 1987), p. 2. 795 Taguieff, La force du préjugé, pp. 361-392.796 On apartheid see, for example, Albert Lévy, ‘On-peut rêver?’, Droit et Liberté (March 1981), Yves Laurin, ‘’Les ghettos de l’apartheid’, Différences (March 1984). The LICRA, on occasions, also made clear its opposition to apartheid, see ‘L’apartheid honni’, Le Droit de Vivre (August-September 1985) : on anti-racist solidarity with Jews in the Soviet Union, see Georges Nicod, ‘1982, année internationale de solidarité en faveur des Juifs et des dissidents soviétiques’, Le Droit de Vivre (February 1982) and, ‘Mobilisation pour les juifs d’URSS’, Le Droit de Vivre (October-November 1985).

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against racism beyond the confines of the nation-state. While this may not necessarily have resulted in more effective or widespread ‘cross-national cooperation’, the consolidation of Europe as a political entity in the early 1990s nevertheless served as the catalyst for anti-racists in Britain and France to start thinking about their activism in more cross-national and European terms.797 Yet this was also mirrored by an increasing Europeanisation of anti-racist memory with the renewed push towards integration interpreted by some as the latest development in Europe’s long colonial history.798 Indeed, the 1990s was a crucial decade in the development of Holocaust and colonial memory more generally. In anti-racist terms, both spheres of memory were brought into a discussion with each other. The reflections of individuals such as Mouloud Aounit and Albert Lévy during this period reflected a process of deeper engagement with the historical reality of different racisms in Europe’s past.

Anti-racists exhibited what one might call a historically-rooted ethic. Anti-racism is a fundamentally ‘positive project’ which rests upon the moral foundations of equality, human rights and social justice.799 What has, however, been missing from contemporary understandings of anti-racist thought and practice in the late twentieth-century is its profoundly historical and temporal dimension. History was not just important to anti-racists as a way of situating themselves and their associated institutions in a broader tradition of resistance. For figures such as Jean Pierre-Bloch or Maurice Ludmer, anti-racism was also about recognising how the past (recent or distant) had shaped their own lives and what it had to teach contemporary society and political culture. The Holocaust and the racist violence of European colonialism were not understood as historical aberrations or temporal parentheses but as potentially reproducible. Any study of anti-racism which fails to take into account the centrality of history and the importance of historical memory cultures in shaping anti-racist rhetoric and its mental landscape will only be incomplete. It is essential, therefore, that late twentieth-century is further historicised and placed in its broader historical, national and transnational contexts.

Writing a contemporary history of British and French anti-racist memory cultures requires drawing upon a sizable body of academic literature, primary source material and historical points of reference encompassing aspects of the

797 Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe, p. 288. 798 See, for example, Race & Class (January 1992). 799 Lloyd, Discourses of Antiracism in France, p. 245.

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Holocaust and the European colonial experience. Within such points of reference, the historian needs to relate that history and memory to the highly national and institutional context of the anti-racist movements upon which they are focusing. As such, given the sheer diversity of historical memories to be explored and the highly specific historic contexts in which they are invoked, the historian must be discriminating when it comes to relevant material. Consequently, there are related topics that can fall beyond the subject’s scope. The conclusion of any research project leaves one painfully aware of just how much more research there is to be done as well as its omissions. Yet closing the door on one research project is, in some ways, the opening of another. The history of European anti-racism offers much fertile ground for further research on, for instance, anti-racism’s role – especially, though not exclusively, in the case of the LICRA - in contributing to the advancement of inter-religious dialogue. Furthermore, the highly gendered dimension of late twentieth-century anti-racism and the role of women within different anti-racist organisations requires particular attention. Exploring and centring the work of women activists and their experiences of working and campaigning in anti-racist circles would provide a more rounded perspective on the contemporary history of anti-racism.800 In addition, while this thesis has largely taken a textual approach to British and French anti-racism in the 1980s and 1990s, a more detailed analysis of anti-racist memory cultures beyond the bounds of anti-racist print media offers a highly promising source of further research. Visual sources and oral history interviews are just some of the material from which a more nuanced and rounded understanding of anti-racist Holocaust and colonial memory could emerge.

To conclude, this thesis has established that historical memory cultures of the Holocaust and European colonialism were crucial to late twentieth-century anti-racist thought and practice. While this may appear to be – as stated in the introduction – an obvious point, these spheres of memory were highly significant and shaped anti-racist discourse and activism in complex and 800 The role of women of colour in demonstrating how the colonial racism of the past bleeds into the racism of the post-colonial present has been particularly important in the development of anti-racist temporalities. See, for example, Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (London, 1985). See also Amrit Wilson, Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain (London, 1978). For more recent analyses and semi-autobiographical reflections on history, memory, racism and gender, see Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race (London, 2018) and Afua Hirsch, Brit(ish): On race, identity and belonging (London, 2018).

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fundamental ways. Anti-racist print media were important discursive spaces for the articulation, representation and contestation of these memory cultures. This thesis has also demonstrated that between 1988 and 1995, there was an anti-racist ‘turn to Europe’ representing a moment of expansion in the temporal, mental and memorial priorities of anti-racists in Britain and France. Throughout the closing decades of the twentieth century, anti-racist memory cultures did not exist in isolation from the rest of civil society. Indeed, as the century came to a close it is clear that they became permanent fixtures in British and French civil society and engaged with contemporary developments in the national memory and political culture.

Despite the left-wing political origins from which certain anti-racist movements emerged, there was nevertheless something distinctly conservative in the nature of anti-racist memory cultures and the role they played in the struggle against contemporary racism. The eighteenth-century Whig, Edmund Burke, famously argued that society rested upon an organic intergenerational contract between ‘those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’.801 At times, the struggle against racism appeared to rest on a similar temporal dimension with anti-racism as a tradition of intergenerational resistance and solidarity spanning across past, living and future generations. While there may appear to be an inherent irony in applying one of the key ideas of a parliamentarian who famously railed against the revolution in France in the context of late twentieth-century British and French anti-racist activism, the Burkean notion of intergenerational obligation nevertheless provides an illuminating conceptualisation of solidaristic memory cultures. Such a perspective rejects anti-racism as – as anti-fascism has been characterised - a purely reactive phenomenon and motivated by the immediate concerns and stimuli of the present.802 This thesis has demonstrated that the anti-racist mind was extraordinarily historicist in outlook and its horizons expanded beyond the temporal confines of the present.

History was of immense importance to anti-racists and on both sides of the Channel activists were profoundly historically-minded.803 Their activism was

801 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, J.G.A. Pocock ed., (Cambridge, 1987), p. 85.802 Copsey, Anti-fascism in Britain, p. 189. 803 See Bonnett, Anti-Racism (London, 2000), p. 9: see also, Lloyd, Discourses of Anti-racism in France, p. 59.

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rooted in a certain conception of historical time and shaped by past experience. The importance of history lay in its metaphorical conception as a chamber of horrors in which to show those who would listen and see where racism can lead if left unchecked and unchallenged. Memory cultures of the Holocaust and European colonialism thus furnished British and French anti-racists with a uniquely historicist temporality. This created a fascinating dynamic within anti-racist conceptions of historical time. The dreiländereck in Basel is the site at which the French, German and Swiss borders meet. In History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (1999), Timothy Garton Ash employed this site as a metaphor to describe the peculiar position of the contemporary historian, cutting across the disciplines of history, journalism and literature.804 However, this metaphor also neatly captures the nature of anti-racist temporalities. Time and again, over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, British and French anti-racists positioned themselves at the dreiländereck of time: standing athwart the past, present and future. History and memory served a pedagogical and didactic function in which the racism of the present could be interpreted and challenged through reference to the past. In navigating the landscapes of anti-racist memory cultures in Britain and France, this thesis offers further ground for future research. Memories of the Holocaust and European colonialism, however articulated and applied, stoked the embers of the anti-racist desire for justice in the present. The scope of anti-racism extended far beyond the temporal constraints of the present.

For anti-racists, the value of memory cultures lay in their potential to act as a rough guide through which to show what racism can do and where it can lead if left unchallenged. The ways in which anti-racist memories were articulated in response to the changing political, cultural and social contexts in which racism manifested are central to understanding how anti-racism – in all its diversity – adapted to contemporary challenges. Furthermore, this contributed to the development of multi-layered and, over time, increasingly flexible memory cultures, furnishing anti-racism with a distinctively temporal dimension. Contemporary racism frequently called to mind historical parallels. Whether these were historically accurate or appropriate parallels did not matter quite so much as the fact that they encouraged historical-thinking among anti-racists. In the cases of individuals such as Pierre-Bloch, Ludmer and

804 Timothy Garton Ash, History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, (New York, 2001), pp. xvii-xviii.

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Sivanandan, it served as a way for anti-racists to situate themselves in relation to the past, especially in terms of their own activist tradition and in relation to the respective institutions and publications they led. Anti-racists sought continuities and ruptures in contemporary racial discrimination for which memory provided a crucial, though not always reliable, guide.

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I am indebted to Daniel Gordon for being a consistently supportive doctoral supervisor. He made me feel very welcome when I first arrived at Edge Hill University and was always keen to include me in various intellectual and teaching-based initiatives. In particular, his encouragement and enthusiasm for the project were much appreciated tonics throughout the natural highs and lows of the PhD experience.

From the very beginning of this project in September 2016, I felt very welcome at the Department of English, History and Creative Writing at Edge Hill University not just as a doctoral student but also, given my position as a Graduate Teaching Assistant, as a member of staff. I am particularly grateful for my time with the Ethnicity, ‘Race’ and Racism seminar. I would also like to

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thank James Renton for his comments and feedback on earlier chapter drafts of this thesis.

I was lucky enough to spend the first semester of the academic year 2017-2018 at the Université de Rouen on ERASMUS+. The four months I spent in France were an excellent opportunity to spend time at the archives in Paris.

Crucially, I would like to thank the helpful archivists and librarians at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine (now La contemporaine), the British Library, Salford’s Working Class People’s Library, the Race Relations archive at Manchester’s Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre, the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton and the George Padmore Institute. I would especially like to thank Daniel Jones at the Searchlight Archives at the University of Northampton who went out of his way to provide me with French as well as English primary source material on anti-racism and anti-fascism.

I am very grateful to audiences at conferences and workshops at the Universities of Northampton, Bangor, London, Strathclyde, Southampton and Edge Hill. The questions and feedback I received were extremely helpful in the development of ideas and arguments which found their way into this thesis.

I am very grateful to Emile Chabal whose encouragement of my research interests was instrumental in nudging me onto this research path. Indeed, my MSc dissertation at the University of Edinburgh on Searchlight magazine and the anti-racist left in Britain was my first introduction to the fascinating history of anti-racist movements.

I am indebted to David Renton who kindly gave up some of his time to talk with me about anti-fascism and anti-racism in Britain.

I would like to thank Fraser Raeburn for his friendship and indispensable advice on all things academic. Thanks also go to Tom Donnelly, Catharine Donnelly and Aaron Lalli for their generous hospitality when I spent research time in London.

Conversations with Sophie Kelly never failed to offer new insights, perspectives and provoke laughter. Thanks also go to Quintus van Galen, Phil Rawsthorne and Katherine McCooey-Heap for their support and the mutual solidarity in all things teaching and researching.

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John Waddell’s curiosity about the thesis’ subject matter, his encouragement and, ultimately, his friendship have been particularly valuable over the past three years.

I would like to thank my mother, Elizabeth Soulsby, and my father, Christopher Soulsby, for their love and support. My sister, Caitlin Soulsby was always an excellent tour guide in Paris. I am grateful for her hospitality and will always remember the cold winter days we spent exploring the city. Fergus and Clara Soulsby could always be relied upon to lift my spirits. John Boyle was always on hand with the spirits.

Last but by no means least, I would like to thank Hannah Iddon for her unwavering support, encouragement and love.

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