>nazism, a type of fascism, was indeed racist as it turned out. but it did
>not necessarily have to be so. the basic underlying move of fascism is to
>create a highly solidaristic *nationalism* by defining the nation, the
>people, the soil *against* some Other. that other can be anything.
But ethnicities don't exist in nature. Defining a nation means the invention of a nationality or an ethnicity, which is a kind of racialization. As Etienne Balibar says in Race, Nation, Class (pp. 52-54):
<quote> Now might we not rediscover, in respect of each conjuncture in which racism and nationalism are individualized in discourses, mass movements and specific policies, what the debate on Nazism emphatically exhibits? In this internal connectedness and this transgression of rational interests and ends, is there not the same contradiction, the terms of which we believe we can see once again in our present-day reality, for example when a movement which carries within it nostalgia for a 'New European Order' and 'colonial heroism' canvasses, as successfully as it has done, the possibility of a 'solution' to the 'immigrant problem'?
Generalizing these thoughts, I shall say then, first, that in the historical 'field' of nationalism, there is always a reciprocity of determination between this and racism.
This reciprocity shows itself initially in the way in which the development of nationalism and its official utilization by the state transforms antagonisms and persecutions that have quite other origins into racism in the modem sense (and ascribes the verbal markers of ethnicity to them). This runs from the way in which, since the times of the Reconquista in Spain, theological antiJudaism was transposed into genealogical exclusion based on 'purity of blood' at the same time as the raza was launching itself upon the conquest of the New World, down to the way in which, in modern Europe, the new 'dangerous classes' of the international proletariat tend to be subsumed under the category of 'immigration', which becomes the main name given to race within the crisis-torn nations of the post-colonial era.
This reciprocal determination shows itself again in the way in which all the 'official nationalisms' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, aiming to confer the political and cultural unity of a nation on the heterogeneity of a pluri-ethnic state, have used anti-Semitism: as if the domination of a culture and a more or less fictively unified nationality (for example, the Russian, German or Romanian) over a hierarchically ordered diversity of 'minority' ethnicities and cultures marked down for assimilation should be 'compensated' and mirrored by the racializing persecution of an absolutely singular pseudo-ethnic group (without their own territory and without a 'national' language) which represents the common internal enemy of all cultures and all dominated populations.
Finally, it shows itself in the history of the national liberation struggles, whether they be directed against the old empires of the first period of colonization, against the dynastic multinational states or against the modern colonial empires. There is no question of reducing these processes to a single model. And yet it cannot be by chance that the genocide of the Indians became systematic immediately after the United States - the 'first of the new nations' in Lipset's famous expression - achieved independence .21 Just as it cannot be by chance, to follow the illuminating analysis proposed by Bipan Chandra, that 'nationalism' and 'communalism' were formed together in India, and continue into the present to be inextricable (largely because of the early historical fusion of Indian nationalism with Hindu communalism). Or again that independent Algeria made assimilating the 'Berbers' to 'Arabness' the key test of the nation's will in its struggle with the multicultural heritage of colonization. Or, indeed, that the State of Israel, faced with an internal and an external enemy and the impossible gamble of forging an 'Israeli nation' developed a powerful racism directed both against the 'Eastern' Jews (called 'Blacks') and the Palestinians, who were driven out of their lands and colonized.
>From this accumulation of entirely individual but historically linked cases
there results what might be called the cycle of historical reciprocity of
nationalism and racism, which is the temporal figure of the progressive
domination of the system of nation-states over other social formations.
Racism is constantly emerging out of nationalism, not only towards the
exterior but towards the interior. In the United States, the systematic
institution of segregation, which put a halt to the first civil rights
movement, coincided with America's entry into world imperialist competition
and with its subscribing to the idea that the Nordic races have a hegemonic
mission. In France, the elaboration of an ideology of the 'French race',
rooted in the past of 'the soil and the dead', coincides with the beginning
of mass immigration, the preparation for revenge against Germany and the
founding of the colonial empire. And nationalism emerges out of racism, in
the sense that it would not constitute itself as the ideology of a 'new'
nation if the official nationalism against which it were reacting were not
profoundly racist: thus Zionism comes out of anti-Semitism and Third World
nationalisms come out of colonial racism. Within this grand cycle, however,
there is a multitude of individual cycles. Thus to take but one example, a
crucial one in French national history, the defeat suffered by
anti-Semitism after the Dreyfus Affair, which was symbolically incorporated
into the ideals of the republican regime, opened up to a certain extent the
possibility of a colonial 'good conscience' and made it possible for many
years for the notion of racism to be dissociated from that of colonization
(at least in metropolitan perceptions).
Secondly, however, I argue that the gap subsists between the representations and practices of nationalism and racism. It is a fluctuating gap between the two poles of a contradiction and a forced identification - and it is perhaps, as the Nazi example shows, when this identification is apparently complete that the contradiction is most marked. Not a contradiction between nationalism and racism as such, but a contradiction between determinate forms, between the political objectives of nationalism and the crystallization of racism on a particular object, at a particular moment: for example, when nationalism undertakes to 'integrate' a dominated, potentially autonomous population, as in 'French' Algeria or 'French' New Caledonia. From this point onwards, I therefore concentrate on this gap and the paradoxical forms it may assume, the better to understand the point that was emerging from most of the examples to which I have referred: namely, that racism is not an 'expression' of nationalism, but a supplement of nationalism or more precisely a supplement internal to nationalism, always in excess of it, but always indispensable to its constitution and yet always still insufficient to achieve its project, just as nationalism is both indispensable and always insufficient to achieve the formation of the nation or the project of a 'nationalization' of society. </quote>