Abstract
This book’s overall purpose is to understand contemporary cultures of fear as a consequence of socioeconomic and political developments. As Lianos rightly observed ‘insecurity has become a cementing material, thus its a kind of substitute for the social bond, between postindustrial citizens’ (p. 1). Hence, otherness and dangerousness are increasingly associated in an otherwise often paradoxical globalised world.
‘Otherness’ is a marker of fear and lack of social confidence, it gives meaning in a fast-moving world by providing late modern existence with a constant search for security and safety. Further, as Lianos put it, it would be wrong to assume that ethnic and religious minorities, the lower classes and those who are generally referred to as ‘socially excluded’ or ‘marginalised’, are linked to perceived threats and deviance because of projects that seek political or geopolitical domination. Instead, he argues convincingly that the foundation of tensions and security and safety considerations around ‘immigrants’, ‘foreigners’, ‘Islamic terrorists’, ‘asylum seekers’, ‘deviant youths’, ‘single mothers’… constitutes the configuration of late capitalist competition and not how the institutional sphere utilises these tensions.
This volume combines chapters by both distinguished and promising social scientists writing from an international perspective. The chapters have been specifically commissioned to address a theme of great topical interest with innovative approaches so as to provide a comprehensive view of current sociological inquiry in continental Europe and beyond. The volume addresses contemporary issues in sociology, political science, social philosophy and cultural studies via two main foci, i.e. contemporary fears, risks and conflicts as well as the exclusion from full citizenship and social participation.
Michalis Lianos, both in his introduction and his own chapter, discusses the framework for understanding otherness in connection with insecurity and danger. Drawing on his own comparative empirical work, Lianos views the ‘risk society’ not as a cause but as a consequence of the need to establish safety as a mode of political governance (p. 7).
Robert Castel argues in his chapter that the rejection of all those who are not fully integrated into society, those ‘born in immigration’, who are seen as foreigners and represent the Other not only as a figure of difference but also as a figure of rejection. Castel’s elaborate argument focuses not only on the tension but also on the strong interdependence between a central, adequate citizen identity and the marginalised identity of the ethnic and racial Other. Within this tension, somewhere between integration and differentiation, inside and outside, Castel argues for his political understanding of community and diversity (p. 21).
Jacques Donzelot boldly tackles the problematic of exclusion via an impressive genealogy of urban and social policies. Donzelot draws on three major lines of argument to demonstrate the transition towards a social investment state: the emergence of social policies focused on competition; penal policies focusing on the victim and on deterrence; and finally a policy around urban experience that gives precedence to property and individual incentives. Donzelot’s impressive Socratic Method reveals competition as the key contemporary priority that generates, accentuates and maintains otherness in capitalist democracies (p. 30).
Konrad Pedziwiatr analyses the increasing mobilisation of European Muslims around religious identity that has been taking place against the background of the dramatisation of Islam in Europe. Many of the young Muslims born or socialised in Europe report that they find in their religion not only answers to their quest for a meaningful identity, but also a sense of empowerment that is denied to them by their marginalised existence. Those who possess the tools to handle the stigma of a religion commonly associated by the general public with violence and viewed as primitive, irrational and barbaric gain an opportunity towards ‘self-actualization’, both individually and collectively (p. 39).
Marina Petronoti discusses the cultural premises of dealing with ethnic minorities in Greece. She focuses on the coexistence of Greek voices which devalue cultural difference with a discourse that praises the multiculturalisation of the country. Petronoti engages two levels of analysis. She first looks at the ways in which the two rhetorical positions deal with immigration in daily life. Then she discusses ethnographic data on the concrete relationships established between Greeks and Eritrean refugees in public domestic environments. In this sophisticated analysis, Petronoti shows the complexity of power in relationships with Others, which establishes complacency itself as a form of domination (pp. 52–53).
Jan Spurk explores the subjective dimension of the need for security. Starting from Freud’s ‘cultural unrest’, he constructs a theoretical and socio-psychological argument that refers to several classical works including Fromm and Taylor. Central to his reasoning is the idea that social exchange, being the dominant social form under capitalism, is characterised by an unavoidable instrumental rationality. Spurk goes on to conclude that this is also the profound social cognition that underlies both the determination and the content of otherness (p. 91).
Patrick Cingolani delves into the fine and sensitive line that generates otherness. By focusing on the unemployed and the precarious classes he reveals at first that otherness is also constructed around conditions that may be random and depend on individual social trajectories. He further argues that the unemployed become Others since they are viewed as not competent or not motivated enough and they are made to internalise that view. From there Cingolani proceeds to show how collective, militant and political processes can uniquely provide the ‘detachment’ and ‘displacement’ from the dominated self in order to neutralise otherness and start the process of emancipation (p. 101).
John D Cash focuses upon the ways in which insecurity affects social imaginaries by tending to delimit their internal complexity and by valorising an exclusivist mode of being and relating organised in terms of the friend–enemy distinction. As the friend–enemy distinction installs itself more thoroughly into the discourse and practices of everyday life, it becomes the hegemonic categorisation through which proper and improper forms of identity are defined. Power and violence are enacted, thought and evaluated, the scope for difference and for the creative resolution of conflict is ever narrowed. This condition is a typical product of insecurity as Cash rightly argues in his chapter (p. 111).
Antonello Petrillo focuses on racism, beyond its formal condemnation across Europe and its banishment from public discourse. Petrillo attributes this formal condemnation to the European roots of Nazism and the consequent aversion of Europeans towards clearly racist discourses. However, Petrillo argues, racism survives in various forms such as differentialism or negationism. Enunciative patterns and different forms of action are generally but strictly related to the variety of multiple subjectivities that crowd the contemporary social scene as Petrillo vividly examines in his chapter (pp. 129–130).
Alexander Neumann deals with the one of the major foundations of heterophobia: authoritarianism fuelled by insecurity. He re-evaluates the works of the Frankfurt School on the ‘the authoritarian personality’, when researchers associated around Adorno sought to explain why the middle class supported Nazism as actively as the working class did. Neumann’s concern is to show the link between authoritarian tendencies of the past and contemporary conditions, starting from the point that security strategies today make use of mechanisms that can be compared with those of the past. He discusses these strategies in detail on the basis of contemporary research studies in Germany, France and the USA. The findings of these studies are deeply unsettling not only because they show that forms of collective democratic involvement, such as trade unionism, do not curb ethnocentrism and heterophobia but also because they confirm that the crossing from latent feelings to the open assertion of authoritarian opinions depends upon the dynamic of social change (p. 142).
After a thorough reading of the book, I have no hesitation in saying that this book is a welcome addition to the existing literature on insecurity and fear and also serves as core reading for scholars and professionals of Sociology, Psychology, Area studies and Development studies. We have to commend the initiative of Michalis Lianos for taking up this task and editing this collection.