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one’s politics and that there can be no politics until the subject has excavated or laid claim to his/her identity. Inherent in such positions is the failure to understand the way in which identity grows out of and is transformed by action and struggle. This is one of the dangers as I see it of the preoccupation of exactly who is covered by the category ‘black’ in contemporary British society. The usage of the notion of black to cover a variety of diverse communities has been rejected by some scholars in favour of other categories such as Asian, Muslim or African Caribbean. Yet others have sought to argue for a notion of ‘black’ grounded in ‘raceial’ particularity. But the danger of these approaches is that one is presented with no more than a strategy of simple inversion wherein the old bad black essentialist subject is replaced by a new good black essentialist subject whose identity necessarily guarantees a correct politics.

Part of the dilemma we have to face is that collective identities are not things we are born with, but are formed and transformed within and in relation to representation. That is, we only know what it is to be English or French because of the way Englishness and Frenchness has come to be represented, as a set of meanings within a national culture. It follows that a nation is not only a political entity but something which produces meanings –a system of cultural representation. People are not only legal citizens of a nation; they participate in the idea of the nation as represented in national culture. A nation is a symbolic community and it is this which accounts for its power to generate a sense of identity and allegiance.

National cultures then are composed not only of cultural institutions, but of symbols and representations. A national culture is a discourse – a way of constructing meanings which in•uences and organizes both our actions and our conceptions of our selves. National cultures construct identities by producing meanings about ‘the nation’ with which we can identify; these are contained in the stories which are told about it, memories which connect its present with its past, and images which are constructed of it. As Benedict Anderson has argued, national identity is an ‘imagined community’, and differences between nations lie in the different ways in which they are imagined.

But how is the modern nation imagined? What representations strategies are deployed to construct our commonsense views of national belonging or identity? What are the representations of, say, England, which win the identiŽcations and deŽne the identities of English people? Collective identity is based on the (selective) process of memory, so that a given group recognizes itself through its recollection of a common past. From this perspective national identity is a speciŽc form of collective identity: this is the fear at the heart of the question of identity –whether posed at the level of the individual or nation. Driven by such fears, the defence of a given cultural identity easily slips into the most hackneyed nationalism, or even racism, and the nationalist afŽrmation of the superiority of

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one group over another. The question is not abstract: it is a matter of the relative power of different groups to deŽne their own identities, and the ability to mobilize these deŽnitions through their control of cultural institutions. Tradition is not a matter of a Žxed and given set of beliefs or practices which are handed down or accepted passively.

Against this background Ann Phoenix argues forcefully that the history of identity politics is not one that has moved unproblematically from resistance to a broader politics of democratic struggle. While the growth of identity politics has been seen by some as challenging cultural homogeneity and providing spaces for marginal groups to assert the legacy and importance of their respective voices and experiences, it has often failed to move beyond a notion of difference structured in polarizing binarisms and an uncritical appeal to a discourse of authenticity. Identity politics has allowed many formerly silenced and displaced groups to emerge from the margins of power and dominant culture to reassert and reclaim suppressed identities and experiences; but in doing so, they have often substituted one master narrative for another, invoking a politics of separatism, and suppressed differences within their own ‘liberatory’ narratives (Bhatt 1997).

This is the same point made succinctly by Stuart Hall in his own critique of black essentialism. Hall argues that essentialist forms of political and cultural discourse naturalize and dehistoricize difference, and therefore mistake what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological and genetic. The moment, he argues, we tear the signiŽer ‘black’ from its historical, cultural and political embedding and lodge it in a biologically constituted racial category, we valorize, by inversion, the very ground of the racism we are trying to deconstruct. We Žx the signiŽer outside history, outside of change, outside of political intervention. This is exempliŽed by the tendency to see the term ‘black’ as sufŽcient in itself to guarantee the progressive character of the politics articulated under that banner, when it is evident that we need to analyse precisely the content of these political strategies and how they construct speciŽc ‘racial’ meanings through politics.

We have, Hall argues, arrived at an encounter, the ‘end of innocence’, or the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject. What is at issue here is the recognition of the extraordinary diversity of subject positions, social experiences, and cultural identities which compose the category black, that is, the recognition that black is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of Žxed trans-cultural or transcendental racial categories and which therefore has no guarantees. What this brings into play is the recognition of the immense diversity and differentiation of the historical and cultural experiences of minority communities in societies such as our own. This inevitably entails a weakening or fading of the notion that race or some composite notion of race around the term black will either guarantee the

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effectiveness of any cultural practice or determine in any Žnal sense its aesthetic value.

While writers such as Hall have been attempting to question essentialist notions of black identity it is interesting to note that new right political discourses have become increasingly preoccupied with defending the importance of ever more fixed notions of culture and nation. They have sought to reconstruct primordial notions of ethnic exclusivity which celebrate national identity and patriotism in the face of criticism from multiculturalists and anti-racists. Central to such discourses is the attempt to fuse culture within a tidy formation that equates nation, citizenship and patriotism with a racially exclusive notion of difference. It is also crucial to recognize that conservatives have given enormous prominence to waging a cultural struggle over the control and use of the popular media and other spheres of representation in order to articulate contemporary racial meanings, and identities in new ways, to link race with more comprehensive political and cultural agendas, to interpret social structural phenomena (such as inequality or social policy) with regard to ‘race’. It has to be said that for the new right the appeal is by and large no longer to racial supremacy but to cultural uniformity parading under the politics of nationalism and patriotism. The emphasis on heritage, the valorization of an élitist view of self and social development, the call to define civilization as synonymous with selected aspects of Western tradition which is being matched by a fervent attempt to reduce pedagogy to the old transmission model of teaching and learning which recoded around consecrated relics, shrines and tradition, that is, the syllabus of English culture. In this case, difference is removed from the language of biologism and firmly established as a cultural construct only to be reworked within a language that concretizes race and nation against the elimination of structural and cultural inequality.

Multiculturalism and identity

As we look towards the next century one of the main questions that we face is the issue of multiculturalism. As Michel Wieviorka (‘Is multiculturalism the solution?’) convincingly argues, the notion of multiculturalism has become an important point of reference in both the academic and the popular lexicon. Within both popular and academic discourse there is growing evidence of concern about how questions of citizenship need to be reconceptualized in the context of multicultural societies. Indeed, in contemporary European societies this can be seen as in some sense the main question which governments of various kinds are trying to come to terms with. Some important elements of this debate are the issue of the political rights of minorities, including the issue of representation in both local and national politics, and the position of

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minority religious and cultural rights in societies which are becoming more diverse (cf Rex 1997). Underlying all these concerns is the much more thorny issue of what, if anything, can be done to protect the rights of minorities and develop extensive notions of citizenship and democracy that include those minorities that are excluded on racial and ethnic criteria.

As Charles Taylor has noted, discussions of multiculturalism and of racial inequality are ‘undergirded by the premise that the withholding of recognition can be a form of oppression’ (Taylor 1992, p. 36). Debates about these issues are thus inherently politicized and take place in the context of mobilizations that use racial and ethnic symbols as a basis for making demands for social and cultural rights, as well as political representation.

As Marco Martiniello insists below (‘Wieviorka’s view on multiculturalism: a critique’) the notion of multiculturalism refers to a wide range of forms of interaction in societies that contain a variety of cultures. This is certainly the starting point of Amy Gutmann’s insightful account of the politics of multiculturalism, where she argues:

By multiculturalism, I refer to the state of a society or the world containing many cultures that interact in some signiŽcant way with each other. A culture is a human community larger than a few families that is associated with ongoing ways of seeing, doing, and thinking about things (Gutmann 1993, p. 171).

Gutmann makes it clear, however, that in a very practical sense questions concerning whether and how the rights of minorities and cultural groups should be recognized in politics are among the most salient and vexing on the political agenda of many societies at the present time. From this perspective she sees the current political controversies about multiculturalism as symbolic of wider uncertainties about the position of racial and ethnic minorities.

On the basis of a comparative analysis of recent trends in the United States, Germany and Britain, Christian Joppke has argued that contemporary debates about multiculturalism need to be understood against the background of the social movements that demand equal rights and recognition for a range of social groups:

“Multiculturalism”, the seeking of equal rights and recognition for ethnic, racial, religious, or sexually deŽned groups, is one of the most pervasive and controversial intellectual and political movements in contemporary Western democracies (Joppke 1996, p. 449).

For Joppke, however, it is also clear that multiculturalism is inherently contradictory, both in conceptual and political terms:

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Following Charles Taylor, one may characterise multiculturalism as a “politics of difference” that fuses egalitarian rhetoric with a stress on authenticity and rejection of Western universalism, which is seen as falsely homogenising and a smokescreen for power. Multiculturalism is modern and anti-modern at the same time (Joppke 1996, p. 449).

From this perspective multiculturalism has to be seen as being partly about (i) the struggle for equality by minorities who are excluded from equal inclusion in society, and (ii) the afŽrmation of cultural difference through claims to ethnic and racial authenticity.

Joppke’s account certainly captures something of the contradictory nature of the political and cultural agendas that go under the label of multiculturalism. It is also clear, however, that in practice policies that are labelled ‘multiculturalist’ have arisen in particular historical environments and political cultures. Stephen Castles, writing from a comparative perspective, has tried to link the question of multiculturalism to the socio-economic and political realities of the migration process itself. Drawing on his research in Europe and Australasia he argues:

Immigrants cannot simply be incorporated into society as individuals. In many cases, a large proportion of immigrants and their immediate descendants cluster together, share a common socio-economic position, develop their own community structures, and seek to maintain their languages and cultures. This is partly an issue of cultural afŽnity, but it is above all a reaction to experiences of racism and marginalisation. Culture and ethnicity are vital resources in the settlement process, which will not just disappear if immigrants are granted full rights as individuals. This means that immigrants cannot become full citizens unless the state and the national community are willing to accept – to some extent at least – the right to cultural difference (Castles 1996, p. 54–55).

In reality, of course, the Žnal sentence of the above quote signals the key issue around which much recent discussion has focused: namely, the extent to which ‘the right to cultural difference’ is seen as a basis for the formulation of policies and strategies for action.

There are quite divergent perspectives in the present political environment about how best to deal with all these concerns. There is, for example, a wealth of discussion about what kind of measures are necessary to tackle the inequalities and exclusions which confront minority groups. At the same time there is clear evidence that existing initiatives are severely limited in their impact. A number of commentators have pointed to the limitations of legislation and public policy interventions in bringing about a major improvement in the socio-political position of minorities.

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This raises a number of questions. First, what kind of policies could tackle discrimination and inequality more effectively? Second, what links could be made between policies on immigration and policies on social and economic issues? What kind of positive social policy agenda can be developed to deal with the position of both established communities and new migrants in the 1990s and beyond? All these questions are at the heart of contemporary debates and have given rise to quite divergent policy prescriptions. It is quite clear that in the present political environment it is unlikely that any sort of agreement about how to develop new policy regimes in this Želd will be easy to achieve. On the contrary, it seems likely that this will remain an area full of controversy and con•ict for some time to come.

But it is also the case that some key issues are coming to the fore in public debate. A case in point is the whole question of citizenship in relation to race and ethnicity. Policy debates in Britain, unlike other European societies, have often not looked seriously at the issue of political and citizenship rights of migrants and their descendants. This is partly because it is widely assumed that such issues are not as relevant in this country. But it also clear that ethnic minorities in Britain and elsewhere are questioning whether they are fully included in and represented through political institutions. In terms of T. H. Marshall’s tripartite distinction between legal, political and social rights, members of ethnic minorities who are immigrants may be granted different legal, political and social rights to the indigenous population (cf Bulmer and Rees 1996). It is not surprising therefore that an important concern in recent years has been with the issue of citizenship and the rights of minorities in British and other European societies. This is partly because there is a growing awareness of the gap between formal citizenship and the de facto restriction of the economic and social rights of minorities as a result of discrimination, economic restructuring and the decline of the welfare state.

The relationship between identity, difference and culture needs to be located within a broader reconceptualization of substantive democracy that can include a place for the ‘rights of minorities’. The value of such a politics is that it makes the complicated issue of difference fundamental to addressing the discourse of substantive citizenship; moreover, it favours looking at the con•ict over relations of power, identity and culture as central to a broader struggle to advance the critical imperatives of a democratic society. Primary to such a struggle is rethinking and rewriting difference in relation to wider questions of membership, community and social responsibility.

In essence we need to get away from the idea that solidarity can only be forged when we all think alike. Solidarity begins when people have the conŽdence to disagree over issues because they ‘care’ about constructing a common ground. Solidarity is not impermeably solid but

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depends to a certain degree on antagonism and uncertainty. If a radical democracy is to function and provide a point of articulation between and across difference, then, a key question must be posed: What kind of society do we want? We need to retain some kind of moral, ethical and political ground – albeit a provisional one – from which to negotiate among multiple interests. Without a shared vision of democratic community, argues Peter McLaren (1993), we risk endorsing struggles in which the politics of difference collapses into new forms of separatism.

The controversies about the Rushdie affair, the rights of religious minorities and a number of other similar issues across Europe have highlighted the increased prominence of these issues in current political debates. The growing public interest about the role of fundamentalism among sections of the Muslim communities in various countries has given a new life to debates about the issue of cultural differences and processes of integration (Asad 1990; 1993). By highlighting some of the most obvious limitations of multiculturalism and anti-racism in shaping policy change in this Želd, such controversies have done much to bring about a far more critical debate about the role and impact of policies which are premised on notions such as multiculturalism. But they have also highlighted the ever-changing terms of political and policy agendas about these issues and the fact that there is little agreement on what kind of strategies for change should be pursued.

The full impact of current debates on the future of immigration is not as yet clear, but it seems likely that they will have an in•uence on how such issues as multiculturalism and anti-racism are seen in the future. In the context of national debates about the position of ethnic minority communities the impact is already evident. In Britain, for example, there are already signs that the Rushdie affair has given a new impetus to debates about issues such as immigration, integration and public order. The hostile media coverage of the events surrounding the political mobilizations around the Rushdie affair also served to reinforce the view that minorities who do not share the dominant political values of British society pose a threat to social stability and cohesion. Some commentators have argued that as a result of the Rushdie affair more attention needed to be given to the divergent political paths seemingly adopted by sections of the African-Caribbean and Asian communities. Whatever the merit of such arguments, it is clear that in the current environment one cannot develop any analysis of contemporary racial and ethnic relations without accounting for differentiation within both majority and minority communities.

Difference, identities and race

Finally, we want to take up a question which is at the heart of the issues covered in this special issue, namely the question of whether it is possible

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to create a kind of society that can acknowledge difference, and not simply diversity? In other words, whether there is a capacity to use difference as a resource rather than fear it as a threat. Recent trends in Britain seem to indicate that a mythic longing for cultural homogenization is alive, not just among nationalists and racists who are celebrating Great Britain, but among the minority and anti-racists as well.

The preoccupation in much of the recent literature in this Želd with issues of identity and the assertion of the relevance and importance of understanding the role of new ethnicities has not resolved the fundamental question of how to balance the quest for ever more speciŽc identities with the need to allow for broader and less Žxed cultural identities. Indeed, if anything, this quest for a politics of identity has helped to highlight one of the key dilemmas of liberal political thought (Moon 1993; Squires 1993). Amy Gutmann captures this contradiction well when she argues:

One reasonable reaction to questions about how to recognise the distinct cultural identities of members of a pluralistic society is that the very aim of representing or respecting differences in public institutions is misguided. An important strand in contemporary liberalism lends support to this reaction. It suggests that our lack of identiŽcation with institutions that serve public purposes, the impersonality of public institutions, is the price that citizens should be willing to pay for treating us all as equals, regardless of our particular ethnic, religious, racial or sexual identities (Gutmann 1992, p. 4)

Yet what is quite clear is that the quest for ever more speciŽc as opposed to universal identities is becoming more pronounced in the present political environment. The search for national, ethnic and racial identities has become a pronounced, if not dominant, feature of political debate within both majority and minority communities in the ‘postmodern’ societies of the 1990s.

The growing evidence of a ‘crisis of race’ (Carby 1992) and of racialized class inequalities in the United States is a poignant reminder that the Civil Rights movement and other movements since then have had at best a partial impact on established patterns of racial inequality and have not stopped the development of new patterns of exclusion and segregation. Indeed, the work of William Julius Wilson on race and urban poverty has suggested that during a moratorium on research into the black American family during the 1970s and 1980s, the social circumstances of black, poor, inner-city families deteriorated signiŽcantly (Wilson 1990).

Such arguments have to be situated carefully in the rather speciŽc context of the racial politics that have shaped American society in the post Civil Rights movement era. But it is also clear that there is evidence

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that within contemporary European societies there is the danger of institutionalizing new forms of social exclusion as a result of increased racial violence and racist mobilizations by the extreme right. It is no surprise in the present environment of fear, violence and physical attacks on foreigners that commentators such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger warn of the danger of violence and ‘civil war’ becoming an endemic feature of many cities in contemporary Europe unless the conditions which produce racism and xenophobic nationalism are fully understood (Enzensberger 1994). Yet others warn of the dangers faced by liberal democracies in the context of the growth of ‘corporate national populism’ and ‘post-modern racism’ (Zizek 1993, pp. 224–26; see also Zizek 1989).

Pronouncements such as these are, of course, intentionally melodramatic and they are meant to be both a warning and a description of the present situation. But given our recent experiences in quite diverse local and national political environments who would argue with any real faith that we can ignore them? Can we be sure that the resurgence of racist nationalism does not pose a very real danger for the possibility of civilized coexistence between groups deŽned as belonging to different racial, ethnic and national identities?

One of the great ironies of the present situation is that during the second half of this century transnational economic, social and political relations have helped to create a multiplicity of migrant networks and communities that transcend received national boundaries. Categories such as migrants and refugees are no longer an adequate way to describe the realities of movement and settlement in many parts of the globe. In many ways the idea of diaspora as an unending sojourn across different lands better captures the reality of transnational networks and communities than the language of immigration and assimilation. Multiple, circular and return migrations, rather than a single great journey from one sedentary space to another, have helped to transform transnational spaces.

Re-thinking Ethnic and Racial Studies

Paul Gilroy has entitled his provocative piece in this issue ‘Race ends here’, and he signals by this the need to go beyond the analytic category of race and to rethink the terms of anti-racist ideas and policies. He, along with a number of other authors in this volume, is surely right in warning of the dangers of reifying ideas such as race and ethnicity. One aim of the present collection of papers is to provoke re•ection about how to reconceptualize the phenomena of ethnicity and race, as we move into a new century in which the colour line and other marks of ethnic difference promise to be just as conspicuous as they have been throughout the century just ending. In making available these papers, we look forward to publishing in future cutting-edge research and scholarship on these

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and other questions, on re•ecting the social and political impact of ideas about race and ethnicity on the world in which we live, and providing a forum for dialogue and debate.

Note

1. The Conference, entitled Rethinking Ethnic and Racial Studies, was held in the Board Room of the London School of Economics on 16 May 1997. We are grateful to Routledge and to the British Academy for their generous Žnancial support which made possible the invitations to overseas speakers to participate. We would like to acknowledge the valuable help from Liza Schuster in administering the conference. The editors are grateful to all past and present friends of the journal for attending and making the whole event a success, and to the contributors and discussants for their conference papers and comments and for the revised versions published here. Avtar Brah and Miriam Glucksmann also acted as discussants at the conference to the papers by Patricia Hill Collins and Ann Phoenix.

References

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GIROUX, H. 1993 ‘Living dangerously. Identity politics and the new cultural racism: towards a critical pedagogy of representation’, Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1–27 GUTMANN, A. 1992 ‘Introduction’ in C. Taylor et al., Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

—— 1993 ‘The challenge of multiculturalism in political ethics’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 171–206

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