LONDON, 22 November 2004 — This year, the Asian Cup was pockmarked by an ugly racism. The Japanese football team was consistently and extraordinarily abused by Chinese fans. Racist chants during the final went unheeded by 12,000 Chinese police and security forces. In Madrid’s Bernabeu stadium, part of the Spanish crowd at last Wednesday night’s fixture monkey-chanted at England’s black players.
There is a new and ugly sentiment abroad and it’s not just in Europe. In Asia, Russia and even the US, despicable prejudices about “the other” held by the majority of the indigenous population are never far from the surface.
One of the ways human beings have defined their identity and sense of belonging from time immemorial is by both insisting on what the tribe shares and by insisting on what the tribe is not, so validating prejudices against other human beings who offend any moral, religious or ethical code.
It mattered that some time before the game in Madrid, the coach of the Spanish national team, Luis Aragones, had called Arsenal’s Thierry Henry a “black shit” and had not withdrawn the remark. If a man in a leadership position can say that and get away with it, a cultural benchmark is established. Once the sentiment is articulated, it becomes a social fact.
But the larger question is why the feelings are there and why they seem to be mounting in so many EU member states. Spain accepts five times more immigrants than Britain; Madrid’s booming economy has needed its immigrant population to quintuple to 14 percent over the last four years. But anti-campaigners warn that racist reactions are less and less subterranean. Spain is not alone.
In France, especially in Corsica, racist and anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise.
But it is Belgian and Dutch societies which are most convulsed by racism. Both have large Muslim populations concentrated in their ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam but now spreading beyond; a simmering racist reaction has been raised to fever pitch by the murder of film maker Theo van Gogh by a fundamentalist.
Immigrant and indigenous Dutch and Belgians are redrawing the moral circle to exclude the “other”. Opinion poll support for parties and politicians claiming to speak honestly about the situation — in other words, those who say that Muslims are the problem — is climbing to new highs. It is a tinderbox.
The question is what to do about it. Part of any response must be to tackle rootlessness, fragmentation and dissociation, which is easier said than done in societies where geographical mobility is rising and mass employment in manufacturing, once a fundamental underpinning of community and neighborhood, is declining with deindustrialization. Globalisation and the rapid pace of change are removing the anchors of societies; rapid immigration of the type seen in Holland, Belgium and Spain only adds to the brew. The exposed and marginalized communities in host societies feel under threat; they respond by putting up a moral fence against the outsider, the threatening, free-riding “other”.
And if the “other” is part of the same race and culture as the targets of the “war against terror”, then there is further legitimization of rank prejudice. Here, some strains of radical Islam have raised the temperature by effectively excluding non-Muslims from their moral circle, in some cases even appearing to endorse the beheadings and revenge killings. White and Islamic racism clash head to head; the result is a potential calamity.
We cannot allow there to be any cherry-picking about who falls inside and outside our moral circle; monkey chants at black footballers are as dangerous as Nazi insignia on synagogues or accusations that Islam is a religion disposed to murder. Every individual warrants moral respect; any qualification can only challenge that general truth. Down that route lies perdition. European societies, our own included, are being put to the test, as are others worldwide. Europe must not be found wanting again.
