William Outhwaite

Reflexive xenophobia

2000

global library

A newspaper report that students participating in international exchange programmes often returned home more, rather than less hostile to foreigners was neatly illustrated by a cartoon in which one (male) student says to another: "I hate foreigners because they've turned me into a xenophobe". In conditions of advanced modernity, I suggest, misunderstanding and prejudice have become reflexive, in the sense that an awareness of the possibility that they may occur, and of ways in which their occurrence might be understood, forms part of the context underlying them - just as, in Anthony Giddens' words, "Anyone who contemplates marriage today...knows a great deal about 'what is going on' in the social arena of marriage and divorce" (Modernity and Self-Identity, 1991, p.14).

Part of the current background to Dutch attitudes to Germans, for example, is the fact, reported at the beginning of February, that the Netherlands foreign ministry was trying to raise half a million guilders of private sector money to improve relations between the two countries and to counter anti-German attitudes, especially among young people. (A colleague in the Netherlands reported the other day that a group of seven-to-eight year old boys riding in his car spent the journey telling jokes, all of which were anti-German.) In Germany itself, an article on Göttingen in Libération Magazine of 11 February reports and endorses the widespread view that the number and the vigliance of anti-racist associations leads to the public expression of superficially tolerant attitudes concealing more hostile ones.

La vigilance des multiples associations de citoyens (pour le droit d'asile, pour les refugiés du tiers-monde, pour l'intégration des Sinti et des Rom, etc.)...provoque un effet pervers. Elle oblige à une attitude politically correct jusque dans le plus menu des propos et empeche l'expression, certes desagréable, vulgaire, des sentiments aggressifs qui font que les Allemands sont de très mauvaise humeur ces derniers temps (p. 43).

The claim by the British Conservative politician, Michael Portillo, that foreigners are corrupt and that they buy their educational qualifications was so extraordinary precisely because of Mr Portillo's multicultural background (his father was a Spanish republican refugee) and apparent (and no doubt real) sophistication. Something similar was at work in Enoch Powell's earlier attacks on black people in Britain. In a recent interview, Powell reflected that he now wished he had said the notorious phrase about the Tiber flowing with blood in Latin. Despite certain physical similarities, Powell was not the working-class comedy racist Alf Garnett; the frisson provoked by his racism, as the political scientist Bill Johnson noted at the time, was that he could pretend to be.

Let me illustrate this with two examples of what I shall call, respectively, reflexive or ironic stereotyping and reflexive misunderstanding. By reflexive stereotyping I mean something like the sense one sometimes has after an international conference that members of the various nationalities present have not just displayed but acted out, à l'outrance, their putative national characteristics. By reflexive misunderstanding I mean essentially a not wanting to understand - a conscious or unconscious resistance to a cultural pattern or to the locutionary or perlocutionary import of an utterance.

It is this process which the American sociologist Stephen Kalberg is concerned with when he distinguishes between unintentional violations of action norms, in which "the level of patterned interpersonal relations remains either totally 'invisible', or defined only imprecisely" and intentional breaches where "the interaction norm is identified, yet viewed as strange and unreasonable" ('West German and American Interaction Forms: One Level of Structured Misunderstanding', Theory, Culture and Society, 4, 1987, pp. 603-618; here p. 605). In the first case I may, for example, Englishly neglect to shake hands with, or kiss, a 'Continental' colleague or friend at the beginning of the day or week, remembering too late, as the victim of my unintentional slight disappears down the corridor, that that is what I should have done. The second kind of breach occurs if, for example, I find a number of French colleagues in the swimming-pool but deliberately reject the polite option of bending down at the pool-side to shake hands with them one by one.

Norms of formality and informality are of course a typical area of tension. Does one adapt to the local norms or does one uphold one's own, in the name of respectability, discretion and decent restraint on the one hand, or democratic egalitarianism and openness on the other? (On the German context and what he calls the gradient of politeness or intimacy, see Norbert Elias, Studien über die Deutschen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989).) The International Sociological Association tends to adopt the no doubt rational solution of a Flucht nach vorn: starting with, or rapidly escalating to, first-name terms. In the context of an international association such as ESSE, there seem to be three particular elements to note. First, the personnel are ex hypothesi sophisticated, cosmopolitan, internationalist and weltoffen - otherwise they'd have stayed home, unless their role was purely to represent some national body. Second, people working together over time in an international context will tend to develop a solidarity which weakens their original tendency to identify with the natives back home or perhaps with those in the organisation's temporary or permaent local site. Third, the use of English as lingua franca, unavoidable in most international associations, appears here in ESSE without the usual disadvantages. Unlike many of my fellow sociologists in the International Sociological Association, for example, you all work very substantially in English, whether or not it is your mother tongue or the official language of the state in which you work.

I'd like however to explore some of these issues further. First, the internationalist, cosmopolitan, or perhaps even European identity can only be defined by way of opposition. They are localists, parochial, blinkered or xenophobic, borné or borniert: we are cosmopolitan etc, at the cutting edge of the internationalisation or Europeanisation of our disciplines and of their institutional embodiment in our universities. But this universality can produce an intolerance of those who have not universalised themselves sufficiently, and this is an important root of one form at least of reflexive stereotyping. We irritatedly complain that the British or the Germans have dragged their feet or dug their heels in on some issue or other; they have been - well, German, or British, or French. In some cases, as when, for example, the inscrutability of southern European accounting practices intersects with a southern European sensitivity about honour, the result can be explosive. (This situation can of course occur in reverse; sometimes it is the northerners who play fast and loose with common funds - thus inviting an additional charge of puritan hypocrisy.)

In such contexts, the blame is of course placed on the others. We would never have thought of using such reductionist categories, even half-seriously, if they had not previously othered themselves, in such an inappropriate and irritating manner. The model is sufficiently familiar not to need elaboration here; see, in particular, Zygmunt Bauman's resurrection of the Polish-Jewish literary historian Artur Sandauer's term 'allosemitism' - the idea of the Jew as other - as indicating the common ground of both antisemitic and philosemitic thought (Bauman, 'Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern', in Brian Cheyette and Laura Marcus (eds), Modernity, Culture and 'the Jew' (forthcoming)). It is interesting to note that the research literature on intercultural communication has rightly focussed on attitudes to one's own culture as well as to the alien one(s): xenophilia is as much a theoretical option, if less often encountered in practice, than xenophobia.

Second, the international solidarities may themselves come under strain and be replaced by more local ones. A familiar example in international associations was the difficulty for Eastern European representatives to take public positions opposed to, or even anticipating, those of the USSR. Explicitly national appeals are however rare, I think.

Third, the perceived neutrality of the English language as a medium is a more complicated issue than it may seem. For one thing, the medium is not in fact neutral in the majority of cases. Native English speakers tend to have a built-in advantage, and this may lead to their over-representation in international associations. Often, of course, English is perceived as neutral and unmarked, and thus used even by conversation partners who have another common language. A Bulgarian and a Russian, for example, may begin by using English, switching to Russian as they get to know one another better. There are also of course technical advantges of English, such as not having to make an explicit choice between T and V forms of address - which in a context like this may mean remembering from one year's meeting to the next whether one is on t or v terms.

More interestingly, perhaps, English as a quasi-neutral medium may be seen as one of a number of universal aspects of associations and meetings which are differentially percived and translated by participants from different cultures. We all seem to do and say the same things, in other words, but we may mean different things by them - in ways we are not aware of. My colleagues Sylvette Cormeraie and John Harper have suggested in a recent paper that one important aspect of these differences can be seen in attitudes to the organisation and conduct of international meetings, with a variety of culturally determined conceptions of what is appropriate - drawing on cultural patterns which are not explicitly thematised but are taken for granted until they come into conflict.

As in other areas of the social sciences, a contentious issue of some interest is how far one explains social processes by cultural tradition and how far by short-run rational adaptation to immediate situations - a standard example is the sensitivity of marriage patterns, especially age of first marriage, to changes in economic conditions. A strongly culturalist model may be more appropriate in a less cosmopolitan context than that of an international association in the humanities or social sciences; it would be intersting to see if debacles of mutual misunderstanding and antagonism are more frequent among natural scientists who are less used to explicitly thematising cultural difference in their day-to-day research. Conversely, and following the hypothesis of the increasing reflexivity of prejudice and hostility, a little learning in these matters may be a dangerous thing; certainly tout comprendre does not mean tout pardonner or tout tolérer.

This meeting provides an opportunity to see whether the explicit thematisation of cross-national misunderstandings and conflicts reduces or, on the contrary, exacerbates them; the beneficial effects of such a process of reflection may take some time to emerge. What cannot I think be doubted is the importance of these issues. Here I have in mind not just the explosive growth of international economic and cultural activity and the need to keep these wheels well-oiled. More important, I think, is the fact that our conceptions of democracy and of our own identities must necessarily become increasingly cosmopolitan. Hilary Wainwright has recently argued for the importance of knowledge in the (inherently cosmopolitan) activity of new social movements. Building on her analysis, it is possible to construct a model of cosmopolitan knowledge which has certain similarities with interdisciplinary knowledge - a kind of savoir sans frontières which social movements and political activists may find it easier to develop than state-bound or discipline-bound party politicians or over-professionalised academics.