Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Spectropolitics and Immigration

Abstract

In the context of the Dutch immigration debate, tributes to the Holocaust and the memory of Europe’s dead Jews increasingly serve to dismantle multiculturalism as a failed paradigm and to drive a wedge between a revitalized, redeemed, color-blind, post-racial Europe and disenfranchized immigrant, minority and Muslim populations. Embedded in these invocations of the Holocaust and its moral imperatives is a ‘spectropolitics’ of tolerance, in which tolerance, staged as an essential touchstone of Dutch identity, supplies a differential norm that measures the civilizational and racial disjuncture between Europeans, minorities, and Muslims, and validates the new dual paradigm of Dutch citizenship and immigration policy: securitization and disciplinary integration. The centrality of the Holocaust as paradigmatic of Dutch and European racial history meanwhile sidelines the colonial past as constitutive of European identity; displaces an alternative understanding of race as (bio- and necro-political) instruments of colonial rule; and disavows the continued application of these instruments of racial rule in Dutch and European post-colonial societies.

Keywords

citizenship Derrida European Union Holocaust immigration Muslims race tolerance

During the summer of 2010 in Amsterdam, many jokes among locals concerned a new colloquialism: the term ‘lok-jood’ (‘bait Jew’ or ‘decoy Jew’). ‘Lok-jood’ was a term invented by Ahmed Marcouch, a Moroccan-born former city council member for the heavily immigrant Amsterdam suburb of Slotervaart, newly elected to the Dutch parliament on the Labor party ticket. It referred to a proposed undercover police force, posing as Orthodox Jews. Reacting to reports that in certain areas of Amsterdam Jews were afraid to be recognized as such, for fear of being attacked by Moroccan youth, Marcouch had suggested the use of ‘decoy Jews’, wearing a yarmulke or skullcap, to draw out the perpetrators. ‘I say send fake Jews to arrest the attackers’, he proposed. ‘Jews have to be able to be recognizable on the street, just like homos and Muslims. Confronting attacks does not just concern the Jewish community, it is all our business’, he added. ‘An attack on a Jew is an attack on me, and on us’ (Langelaar, 2010).

In addition to this special police force, his wider action plan against intolerance called for the organization of ‘homo-pleinen’ (gay squares), and the organization of a national ‘Yarmulka Day’ (‘keppeltjes dag’) in major Dutch cities, during which, as he explained, all male inhabitants, from various backgrounds, would wear the Jewish head covering as a demonstration of tolerance towards each other (Willems, 2010).

These proposals carry a distorted echo from the heydays of Dutch multiculturalism, the 1980s and 1990s. Then, in an effort to recruit more ‘allochtonen’ (a Dutch term widely used to refer to non-white immigrants and their descendants) into the municipal police force, the chiefs of police had proposed the possibility that Muslim or Sikh recruits could exchange the blue police cap for the hijab or the turban. Marcouch’s suggestions for a Yarmulka Day, gay squares, and a Jewish ‘impostor’ police force, however, were made in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 national elections. By then, multicultural tolerance had been dumped on ‘the dunghill of political history’ as the Trojan horse that would enable Dutch liberal society’s own undermining (Doomernik, as cited in Vink, 2007: 338).

This shift in opinion was underpinned by the 2010 election results, in which the populist Party of Freedom (PVV) led by Geert Wilders, campaigning on a radical anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant platform, won 16 percent of the popular vote. The fact that Wilders’ campaign promise of a burqa ban (‘to protect the character and good habits of public life in the Netherlands’) was adopted in the government mandate of the new center-right minority cabinet (made up of the Liberal (VVD) and Christian Democratic (CDA) parties) made it clear that, henceforth, Wilders’ Party of Freedom would use its pivotal position (its vote supplied the needed majority support for the ruling coalition) to make its anti-multiculturalism, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-Europe agenda a centerpiece of the new administration (NRC, 2011).

Ahmed Marcouch’s proposed police force of undercover ‘fake’ Jews illustrates a striking, and mostly overlooked, aspect of this political shift. The vernacular joke culture spawned by the proposal fed on a number of idiosyncrasies: the decidedly non-politically correct use of the term ‘Jew’ by a Dutch politician of Moroccan background, himself the incarnation of the now discarded multicultural promise; the concept of Jewish ‘impersonators’ (staples of Dutch pre-war vaudeville and burlesque entertainment), resuscitated not only to protect Jews but all of ‘us’ against those (other Moroccans) attacking Jews and, with it, the principles of Dutch multicultural conviviality. But what Marcouch’s proposal illustrates, above all, is the rhetorical mobilization of Jews – Holland’s (and Europe’s) paradigmatic minority – and anti-Semitism in the incendiary debate about liberal tolerance, its limits, and the place of (non-white) immigrants and, particularly, Muslims in the Netherlands and the new, supra-national Europe.

This article analyzes the cultural and ideological constellation in which tolerance, anti-Semitism, decoy Jews, Yarmulka Days, gay squares, Islamophobia and burqa bans encounter each other. While I do not wish to understate the seriousness of anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish attacks, whether perpetrated by Muslim youth or right-wing extremist groups, my attention here concerns the invocation of the Shoah and anti-Semitism as emotional touchstones in contemporary debates about the distinctiveness of Dutch and European identity and the limits (and proclaimed failure) of multiculturalism.

These emotional touchstones, I argue, present what Jacques Derrida calls a ‘hauntology’ at the heart of neoliberal Europe. The memory of Jews and the infamy of intolerant, illiberal Europe (publicly acknowledged, as historian Tony Judt has observed, only in the late 1970s and 1980s) were to provide the moral beacon for a new Europe (Judt, 2005). Deployed as guarantee of European postwar liberal ‘tolerance’, European Holocaust memorialization tends to figure the Shoah redemptively, as an object lesson in ‘intolerance’ demanding anti-racist vigilance and the protection of Jews and other minority groups from discrimination. Increasingly, however, I will argue, this conjuring of the ghosts of Jews and the Holocaust serves as a nationalist and racist conceit, designed to drive a wedge between a redeemed, post-racial Europe supposedly pledged to racial, gender, and sexual equality, and Europe’s disenfranchised immigrant, minority and Muslim populations. This instrumentalization of Holocaust memory not only implies what Alvin Rosenfeld has criticized as the transformation of the horrors of the Shoah into a universalist moral ‘uplift’ story of an ongoing fight of the human ‘spirit’ against intolerance (Rosenfeld, 2011). Used as an index of the civilizational and racial disjuncture between Europeans and Muslims, it also validates the new dual paradigm of European immigration policy: securitization and disciplinary integration.

Hauntology, Jacques Derrida suggest, is at the heart of the ‘dramaturgy of modern Europe’, and particularly its unifying projects. But this haunting is structured around a repression that ensures the continuation of the haunting (1994: 3, 46, 59, 135). The fact that the debate about the ‘limits’ of liberal tolerance, immigration, and the place of Muslims and people of color in the Netherlands and in the ‘new’ supra-national Europe more generally is played out within the purview of Europe’s ‘post-racial horizon’, and invariably ‘understood’ through the prism of the figure of the immigrant/alien and in terms of cultural values (such as tolerance), points to a drastic foreshortening of the understanding of the place of race and racism within European history. A number of scholars have pointed out, in this regard, that the designation of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism as the paradigmatic historical experience of racism not only salvages the ‘white mythology’ of contemporary Europe’s universalist claims to moral exemplarity, but paradoxically also ‘buries’ race. The adoption of the norm of ‘color-blindness’, instituted in the name of the anti-racist struggle for tolerance, has made race in Europe a disappearing act: the continued existence of racially-based inequalities is not merely denied, but also erased through the elimination of racial designations in social and cultural processes and analytical frameworks (in avoidance of the charge of racism) (Hesse, 2007: 660; Goldberg, 2006: 338; 2009: 156).

In order to effectively critique the new paradigms of Dutch and European immigration policy (securitization and disciplinary integration), then, we have to examine what revitalizations and what disavowals the memorialization of Auschwitz makes possible, which historical pasts and ghosts it inherits, and which it displaces, and call up other specters, in particular those buried in Europe’s colonial past, that not only are disinherited but whose afterlife continues to cast a spell on post-colonial, pluralistic European societies.

Multicultural Consensus Reconsidered

The image of the Netherlands as the poster child of multiculturalism dates from the 1980s. Then, a series of left-center coalition governments took cognizance of the fact that as a result of immigration flows, primarily from the former colonies of Surinam, the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba, as well as from guestworkers’ source countries Turkey and Morocco, the Netherlands had acquired a new face. In response to the rise of extreme right-wing movements and racist incidents such as the murder of the 15-year-old Dutch Antillean Kerwin Duinmeyer in 1983, the Dutch government launched an anti-racist offensive and replaced what until then had been a more or less improvisational policy regarding immigrant integration with a bundle of measures designed to improve the legal, social and economic conditions of its immigrant and minority population. This included anti-discrimination legislation, liberal family reunification policies, relaxing of naturalization laws, allocation of local voting rights to non-citizens after five years of residency, and institutional and financial support for ethnic minority groups seeking to maintain their own cultural identities according to the principle of ‘sovereignty in one’s own circle’ with which the Dutch had tamed sectarian strife in the past (Vink, 2007: 340; Lucassen and Lucassen, 2011: 94–100).

The multicultural approach was never without its critics. But while its detractors in the 1990s could be found primarily on the right side of the political spectrum, in 2000 it was an editorial by Paul Scheffer, a prominent left-wing intellectual and publicist, which gave voice to the rising dissatisfaction with the prevailing paradigm of immigrant integration (Vink, 2007; Buruma, 2006). Scheffer’s main concern involved the growing presence of Islam in the Netherlands, which he considered a threat to Dutch identity and its tradition of tolerance, given the fact that Islam’s acceptance of the separation of Church and State, in his view, was highly questionable. As an example of the fallacies of multiculturalism, he homed in on a remark, made during a parliamentary debate about education, that Turkish children should not be bothered with the history of the war years 1940–45, years that, for Scheffer, and many Dutch with him, constitute the crucible of Dutch national identity. Dutch identity had to be shored up, was Scheffer’s conclusion, and tolerance, its guiding concept, stripped of its cosmopolitan illusion and defended against religious compulsion (Scheffer, 2000).

The sudden political rise, in 2002, of the populist leader Pim Fortuyn, who used his flamboyantly gay persona as an advertisement of a Dutch way of life that, according to Fortuyn, was undermined by asylum seekers, immigrants and Islam, an intolerant, ‘backward’ religion, served as evidence that Scheffer’s discontents were widely shared. So did the rise of Geert Wilders’ populist Party of Freedom (PVV) in 2005, with a campaign that resuscitated the message of Fortuyn, whose political career had been cut short by his murder (by an animal rights activist – Fortuyn liked to dress in furs) in 2002. Wilders’ message – that ‘we are heading for the end of European and Dutch civilization as we know it’– in particular resonated with a growing sentiment, informed by 9/11 and the gruesome murder, in 2004, of Theo van Gogh, a provocative Dutch filmmaker and outspoken critic of Islam, by a radical Islamist second-generation Dutch Moroccan, that liberal tolerance had been misguided in its promotion of a hands-off, live and let live approach to multicultural citizenship (Buruma, 2006; van der Veer, 2006; Brown, 2006: 5–6).

That also was the conclusion of the British historian Jonathan Israel, a specialist in early modern Dutch history, who used the public platform of the prestigious Pierre Bayle lecture as an occasion to put in his two cents on the events surrounding the murder of van Gogh. In his books, Israel has boosted the Dutch self-image by arguing that the origins of tolerance lay not in the Enlightenment France of Voltaire and Montesquieu, but in the Dutch Republic of the Golden Age, with figures such as Pierre Bayle and the Dutch-Jewish Spinoza. But that tradition of tolerance, the ‘basic, unquestioned, taken for granted pillar of the Dutch sense of identity’, he warned, was going belly up. As an example, Israel cited the taboo, before 9/11, on any discussion of the problem of Islamic fundamentalism and on the general political neglect of Muslim anti-Semitism, which had ‘swept’ across much of Europe, particularly France, Belgium and the Netherlands, since the end of the 1990s and the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. The increase in anti-Semitic attacks on synagogues, Jewish cemeteries and on Jews wearing the kippah in the streets, or otherwise recognizable as Jews, he argued, had been met by a general complacency, partly motivated by a desire not to offend Muslims, partly informed by a residual anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism.

The root of the problem, for Israel, lay in a general intellectual and cultural failure to grasp the essential conditions for a ‘viable toleration’ in a multicultural society. His conclusion that only a sturdy defense of the rational, secular state would ensure that ‘no theological bloc of any description’ would ‘be allowed to translate its biases and prejudices into active harassment, discrimination and violence’ was widely seen as a stab in the direction of Dutch multiculturalism (Israel, 2004; van der Veer, 2006: 112).

Tolerance, Liberal Universalism and the West

The political weight of Israel’s emotive appeal to tolerance as the touchstone of Dutch identity, of course, goes beyond the ‘corruption’ of Dutch tolerance. Implied in the speech is the ‘Never Again’ of Europe’s post-Holocaust pledge, and the reneging on the ‘debt’ owed to the ghostly inheritance of dead Jews, which, as Tony Judt has argued, became the ‘very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity’ (Judt, 2005: 804; Derrida, 1994: 114). This debt, which informs Europe’s stated commitment to human rights and anti-racism, including the de-bunking of racism’s scientific and political legitimacy, its expulsion from the public arena, and the adoption of an official ideology of ‘color-blindness’, ensured that the Enlightenment heritage of tolerance could become midwife to fundamentally ‘post-racial’ European societies (Hesse, 2004, 2007; Goldberg, 2006, 2009; Sayyid, 2010: 16).

Israel’s sanctification of tolerance as the foundation of Dutch identity, now besieged by Islamic fundamentalism and Muslim anti-Semitism, however, effectively ethnicizes tolerance as a uniquely Dutch (and Western) civilizational attribute. In doing so, his speech gave a Dutch twist to what Wendy Brown has described as the reframing of tolerance as a ‘civilizational discourse’, which identifies tolerance with the Enlightenment and the West. As Brown and others have pointed out, the developmental framework inherent in the discourse of tolerance means that tolerance easily lends itself to being ‘culturalized’. It is seen as a cultural attribute that is fundamental to modern liberal political culture and its normative subjectivity of the autonomous, secular, rational individual, but that some nations or peoples either have not yet ‘acquired’ or, as in the Manichaean concept of a clash of civilizations, are inherently incompatible with (Brown, 2006: 150). Posturing as a universal value, tolerance is in fact deeply marked by the logic of historicist racism (El Tayeb, 2011: xiii; Dzenovska, 2010).

Within this avowedly post-racist, culturalist framework, liberal tolerance – the guarantee of Europe’s refound humanity – operates as a form of governmentality with a regulatory and differentiating function (Brown, 2006). It serves as a norm that not only is constitutive of ‘Europeanness’ and the ‘West’, but that also defines a terrain of politics, in which application of the norm of tolerance demands the proliferation of technologies for evaluating deviations from and perversions of it, and the development of instruments securing compliance with it. It enables a sorting operation between (superior) belonging and (inferior) non-belonging, and forms the basis for a policy of differential recognition/incorporation/exclusion that is profoundly racialized. Anti-Semitism, within this sorting index, serves as the ultimate mark of non-belonging.

As a regulatory norm, liberal tolerance not only informs the idea of a fundamental difference between ‘open’ (tolerant) and ‘closed’ societies that necessitates the safeguarding of European cultures from Europe’s Others (i.e. the fortification of borders and the expansion of the global security architecture). It also translates the idea of cultural difference into cultural inequality (measured, against the norm of tolerance, as cultural handicaps, deficiencies and competencies) which demand the protection of a national ‘essence’ and the shoring up of citizenship laws and integration policies (Balibar, 1991a: 25; Da Silva, 2011: 140).

This ‘culturalization’ of borders and migration policy, a transnational European phenomenon, then, legitimates the increasing militarization of the state, and the expulsion and violent abjection of those who are relegated to positions outside the sphere of an increasingly narrowly defined conception of ‘belonging’. It presents the nation in ethno-nationalist terms, as a natural community based on common values, a common culture and a common past, whose norms immigrants and minority communities will have to adopt if they want to be folded into the biopolitical life of the nation-state (Moulier Boutang, 2006; Walters, 2004; Tyler, 2010; Joppke, 2007; Žižek, 2010).

Citizenship, Securitization and Integration

In the Netherlands, as elsewhere in Europe, the securitization of immigration not only concerned the policing of human mobility but also focused on the link between immigration, integration and citizenship. This was evident in the proposed revision of Dutch citizenship laws of 2005, which classified ‘failure to integrate’ on the part of ‘third-country nationals’ a security risk, and mandated obligatory participation in language and citizenship programs as a precondition for having access to citizenship rights and juridical status (Guild et al., 2008: 3–4).

Ostensibly, the reformulation of the criteria of citizenship in terms of ‘cultural competencies’ was inclusionary: the ‘inburgerings’ (civic integration) requirement, which paralleled similar requirements in France, Britain and Germany, was framed not as a demand for assimilation of immigrants and minorities but as a measure facilitating ‘integration’. It targeted the cultural ‘isolation’ of ethnic minorities, not their existence as such (Hesse, 2007: 658; Žižek, 2010). To that end, it stipulated that candidates for ‘inburgeren’ demonstrate proficiency in language but also be educated in Dutch values such as freedom and tolerance, attaching punitive measures, ranging from fines to deportation, to failure to comply with the measure or flunking the ‘inburgerings’ test.

The exclusionary aspects of the new citizenship law were less widely publicized. In addition to exempting EU citizens but not citizens from Turkey from the civic integration requirement (despite the fact that Turkey, by virtue of its associative status with the EU, should have been exempted), the Integration Abroad Act added to the citizenship law made passing the integration test prior to immigrating for marriage or family reunification purposes obligatory for ‘non-Western’ foreign nationals. It also imposed a stringent ‘sustainability requirement’ on Dutch citizens and residents of ‘non-Western’ origin seeking to bring in family members.

Despite the fact that the law was framed as ‘non-discriminatory’, it effectively established a differential categorization of citizenship and access to rights based on national origin and gendered socioeconomic profile. For all its official discourse of ‘facilitating integration’, the government made clear that the main motivation for the legislation was immigration reduction of nationals from countries whose different socioeconomic and political background might ‘lead to unwanted and unbridled immigration and essential problems with integration in Dutch society’. Neither did it leave much doubt about the real targets of the integration law: Turkish and Moroccan brides imported by second generation Dutch nationals, young Turkish and Moroccan mothers culturally ‘isolated’ from ‘mainstream’ Dutch culture, and a group of unemployed young men from the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba and Curacao prone to criminal activities. (An earlier version of the bill also required some groups of naturalized citizens, including those enjoying social and unemployment benefits, as well as Antillean and Aruban Dutch citizens by birth, to be tested; Guild et al., 2008.) As the government explained, ‘a significant portion of this group of migrants has characteristics that are unfavorable for adequate integration in Dutch society … [They] have little contact with Dutch people, identify mainly with their own group, and orient themselves mainly to their own language and culture’. One group of primary concern were ‘women from ethnic minority groups’, who, as the memorandum to the bill explained, ‘have a considerably lower level of education than Dutch women’ (Human Rights Watch, 2005: 14–5, 18).

Christian Joppke has interpreted the Dutch ‘inburgerings’ requirement as an extreme version of a broader European consensus on the need to establish integration policies in line with the EU’s common basic principles (liberty, tolerance, democracy, human rights, fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law), while respecting the integrity of immigrant cultures. Civic integration, he argues, applies the neoliberal logic that frames economic globalization at large to the domain of migration, by treating migrants as individuals in charge of their own integration (in the Netherlands the slogan is ‘zelfredzaamheid’ or self-sufficiency), rather than as members of groups who are seen as victimized by society and thus are targets of a corrective group policy (Joppke, 2007: 8; 15; Vink, 2007: 346–7). The notion of integration, ‘in its economic instrumentalism … is a world apart from old notions of cultural assimilation and nation-building’, he concludes, and consequently, ‘it would be wrong to interpret civic integration of immigrants as a rebirth of nationalism or racism’ (Joppke, 2007: 22).

Peter Geschiere, however, argues that, in its emphasis on cultural purism rather than on socioeconomic integration, the Dutch integration law moved close to a definition of autochthony in which the possibility of integrating ‘Others’ is practically ruled out (2009: 167). It rests on a differentialist, biopolitical regulatory apparatus that racializes national membership and belonging by testing for ‘cultural competencies’, and that individualizes its racism in the guise of a social Darwinian model of promoting autonomous subjects (‘zelfredzaamheid’ is again the keyword in the 2011 Dutch governmental policy statement on integration; Hesse, 2007: 658; Amin, 2004: 12; Rijksoverheid, 2011; Goldberg, 2009: 189; Balibar, 1991a: 26–7; Koshy, 2001: 193). The fact that inburgering or integration study ‘kits’ distributed to overseas candidates for immigration to the Netherlands included a video showing topless women sun bathing on the beach and gay men holding hands and kissing in public made headlines in the international media. That The Diary of Anne Frank was proposed as a required text for the integration course is no less revealing (Goldberg, 2006: 339).

The implication of the civic integration law is that the origin of, and solution to, the social tensions (‘social degradation’) caused by the ‘failed integration’ of racialized immigrant and minority populations lies with these populations’ deficient cultural values (rather than racial, social and economic segregation and spatial containment). It stipulates that immigrants and their offspring must integrate into an essentialized and normative national narrative (which locates tolerance, redeemed through the crucible of the Shoah, as the kernel of Dutch ‘fictive ethnicity’) for society to be restored to unity and cohesion (Judt, 2005; Hesse, 2007; Balibar, 1991b: 49; El Tayeb, 2011: xii–xiii). Inherent in this discourse is the elision of the social disparities and racial antagonisms produced by (neo-liberal) capitalism and a racial state, displaced onto the ‘spectral presence’ of ‘the immigrant/Other’ who now becomes legible as a disfigurement, a source of corruption of the organic unity of the nation (Žižek, 1993; Vogt, 2013).

Exclusion and ‘Inclusion’: Civilizational Discourse and Civilizing Mission

It is not surprising that, in a context in which the presence of Muslims is problematized in these terms, populist and extreme right-wing politicians in the Netherlands as well as in Europe more broadly have largely (and opportunistically) exchanged their anti-Semitic rhetoric for an aggressively pro (right-wing) Israel stand, and appeal to the civilizational discourse of tolerance, and the ‘debt’ implied in it, to call for the compulsory (wholesale or partial) repatriation of Europe’s Muslims. Thus, when Frits Bolkestein, eminence grise of the Dutch right-wing Liberal Party and erstwhile political mentor of Wilders, declared that, notwithstanding Marcouch’s proposed police force of ‘decoy Jews’, observant Jews did not have a future in the Netherlands because of the growing anti-Semitism primarily among Dutch Moroccans, advising the orthodox Dutch Jewish community to emigrate to Israel or the United States, Geert Wilders (never one to make much of a secret of his preference for the wholesale repatriation of Holland’s one million Muslims as a solution to what he calls the Muslim ‘Al Hijra doctrine of migration and demography’) tweeted in response that ‘It’s not the observant Jews that should emigrate, but the Moroccans who are anti-Semitic’ (PressEurope, 2010; Jerusalem Post, 2010; De Pers, 2010).

For many on the left, meanwhile, Muslim anti-Semitism was emblematic of a perceived degradation of Dutch society that required the retooling of multiculturalism into a ‘civilizing offensive’. This (ostensibly inclusionary) pedagogical project was informed by the Labour Party’s vision of integration founded on an ‘ethics of responsibility’. It was based on the idea that, in a heterogeneous society faced with conflicting cultures and values, the perceived degradation of Dutch society as well as the radicalization of Muslims should be countered with the teaching of principles of tolerance, self-restraint and citizenship (van Tol, 2010). Immigrants ‘needed to become part of society’, Job Cohen (leader of the social-democratic Labour Party and former mayor of Amsterdam) declared. And that, he emphasized, included ‘learning the language and respecting the laws, and appreciating … the paramount Dutch value, freedom’. It also meant studying ‘a Dutch canon of important historical events and figures’. In this canon of historical events, the lessons of the Holocaust would be central. Thus, in an official speech on the Second World War Memorial Day of 2010, Ahmed Marcouch called for the mandatory inclusion of the Shoah in school curricula, and publicized the fact that, during his term as councilman for Slotervaart, he sent a group of young Moroccan men to visit Auschwitz – in the face of sizeable community opposition, he added (Marcouch, 2010). And in his reaction to Bolkestein’s warning that orthodox Jews should leave the Netherlands, Marcouch responded that Jews should not leave, because they belonged to the Netherlands. ‘We have to get on with the fight against anti-Semitism and with the civilizing offensive’, he declared (Dutchnews.nl, 2010; De Telegraaf, 2010).

After all, Marcouch is well aware that paying tribute to the collective debt of the Holocaust is the ‘price of admission’ charged to those who want to be counted as Europeans. Here it is perhaps expedient to return to Tony Judt, who, in his meditation on the centrality of dead Jews in the redemptive paradigm of Europe, reminds us that for Jews like Heinrich Heine, it was baptism that was their ‘European entry ticket’. In 1825, the ‘price of admission to the modern world was the relinquishing of an oppressive heritage of Jewish difference and isolation’. ‘Today’, Judt argues, ‘the pertinent European referent is not baptism. It is extermination’ (2005: 803).

While on the right, the ‘problem’ of immigration (and particularly the presence of Muslim minorities at the heart of European societies) is framed in terms of a confrontation between different cultures that are inherently antithetical, if not incompatible, the ‘civilizing offensive’ on the left similarly assumes an evolutionary lag with respect to modern liberal political culture and its norm of tolerance on the part of immigrant populations insufficiently exposed to its currency. However, it considers that lag a target of bio-political reprogramming (Balibar, 1991a: 20; Goldberg, 2009: 156; Da Silva, 2011; Stolcke, 1995; Amin, 2004; Lentin, 2008; Dzenovska, 2010).

But the left’s conditional promise of integration presupposes its exclusionary aspects. From that perspective, the statement of Ahmed Ahboutaleb, Amsterdam’s Moroccan city alderman and the number two in Cohen’s mayoral administration, that ‘Whoever doesn’t want to go along with Dutch society and its achievements can pack his bags’ (made during a speech in a mosque), sounds surprisingly similar to Wilders’ threats of Muslim repatriation (Shorto, 2010).

It constitutes evidence, as Slavoj Žižek (2010) has astutely observed, that in Holland, but also in France, Germany, and Austria, ‘anti-immigration politics went mainstream and finally cut the umbilical cord that had connected it to far right fringe parties’. In the process, across Europe, political parties on opposing sides of the political spectrum united in a revitalized pride in national identity and heritage, and in the idea that immigrants are ‘guests’, who have to adjust to the values that constitute the identity of the host society.

The call for an ‘ethics of responsibility’ and a renewed ‘civilizing offensive’ designed to restore the cohesive force of common Dutch norms and values by instilling them into layers of the population (‘allochtonen’, in particular Muslim immigrants, and their descendants who are not subject to the official civic integration requirement) in which they are deemed to be insufficiently present, has an interesting genealogy. Indeed, it recycles a term used in the late 19th century, when a similar ‘beschavings offensief’ on the part of the Dutch elite to instill ‘civilized’ norms and values became a cornerstone of the Dutch colonial policy known as the ‘Ethical Policy’ in the Dutch East Indies, which sought to elevate colonial society through the modernization of its physical infrastructures and pedagogical projects. Simultaneously, it referred to a disciplining social policy directed towards displaced former agricultural workers, migrating en masse to become proletarianized in the industrializing centers of the Netherlands, and an assimilatory policy aimed at Jewish immigrants which advocated, among other things, the eradication of Yiddish in synagogues and schools (Amsenga, 2005; van der Brink, 2004).

It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore the link between the governmentality of tolerance – for which the citizenship and civic integration legislation provide the framework – and the racial technologies of colonialism in detail. Nevertheless, the resurrection of the pastoral concept of a civilizing mission suggests the ways in which (to borrow from Barnor Hesse’s and Ann Stoler’s analyses of the colonial ‘mission civilatrice’) the contemporary ‘beschavings offensief’ (similarly predicated on the idea of European universalism) on the one hand engenders a ‘politics of inclusiveness’ based on the ‘assimilation of otherness’, and on the other constructs post-colonial taxonomies of racialized ‘cultural competencies’ that form the basis of assessments of (non) belonging and set the parameters of membership. Moreover, the Dutch civilizing offensive revisits the overlap of gender, race, class, and sexuality in the construction of Europeanness and its moral authority, astutely analyzed by Ann Stoler in the context of the Dutch colonial ‘mission civilatrice’ (Stoler, 1995; Hesse, 2007).

Indeed, the arguments the new Dutch government enlisted to support the burqa ban demonstrate this intersection of gender, race, class and sexuality. These arguments intertwined the civilizational values idea (burqas are incompatible with basic European values such as gender equality); a paternalistic gender equity proposition (burqas are an impediment to Muslim women’s emancipation, integration and self-sufficiency); and a security argument (burqas are a public safety risk), to mobilize the stereotype of the (male) Muslim as pre-modern, intolerant, patriarchal, fanatic, and oppressive (Balibar, 1991a: 24; Tigchelaar, 2011; El Tayeb, 2011: 82). The idea that a burqa ban represents an ‘intervention’ on behalf of Muslim women’s rights and equality rehashes a rhetoric that, as Fatimah El Tayeb points out, was already dissected by Frantz Fanon as a stratagem of colonial symbolic politics that uses the ‘emotive politics of dress’ to situate Muslim women as ‘bearers’ of, and bearing the brunt of, an intolerant, backward-looking, violent and patriarchal culture. The political coalition between right-wing and progressive (feminist) movements that is facilitated by this rhetoric aligns feminist movements with differential racism, under the banner of the defense of the universal values of tolerance, freedom, and equality (El Tayeb, 2011: 92–3).

The charge of Muslim homophobia does the same work for the queer movement. Yasbir Puar has argued that the incorporation of queer, homosexual and gay subjecthood into the biopolitical life of the nation has been ‘condoned’ by liberal, multicultural, societies only in so far as the institution of the regulatory norm of (white) ‘queer, liberal secularity’ allows for a ‘parallel process of demarcation from populations targeted for segregation, disposal, or death’. The place of the deviant, pathological Other of that norm, not surprisingly, has been taken up by religion, in particular, Islam. This cooptation of the ‘liberationist paradigm’ of queerness is supported by the liberal conviction that ‘religious and racial communities are more homophobic than white mainstream queer communities are racist’. It produces ‘convivial relations’ between queerness and the ‘tactics, strategies, and logistics of our contemporary war machines’, such as militarism, securitization, war, Islamophobia and neoliberalism (Puar, 2007: 15, xiv). The incorporation of dead Jews as guarantee of Europe’s new found ‘humanity’ and the sanctification of tolerance as a ‘debt’ owed to their memory yields similar results, particularly when it is yoked to the charge of Muslim anti-Semitism.

It is within this constellation, in which the rights of newly enfranchised and ‘whitened’ sexual and gendered subjects justify the disenfranchisement of racialized immigrant and minority populations, that decoy Jews, gay squares, and yarmulke days encounter each other. It is the constellation of a haunting (Derrida, 1994: 219).

Locating Specters: Shadows and Doubles

The hauntology at the heart of the ‘dramaturgy of modern Europe’ is embedded most deeply in tributes to the memory of Jews and the Holocaust. In the civilizational discourse of tolerance, the ghostly remains of Jews are deployed to externalize Muslims as Europe’s Others. But the logic of haunting is determined by the excess, the heterogeneity, that is called up in the act of conjuring the dead. Every conjuration, which is simultaneously meant to claim an inheritance (to ‘enliven the new’) and to exorcise (to ‘certify’ death in order to ‘inflict it’), is structured around a disavowal that guarantees the continuation of a haunting (Derrida, 1994: 3, 46, 59, 135).

Some of this ghostly excess was conjured up by Job Cohen, whose Labour Party suffered heavy losses in the June 2010 elections. The political face-off in these elections itself was couched, again and again, in emotionally evocative Second World War imagery. On one side, Geert Wilders deliberately fashioned himself in the image of a resistance leader, a savior of democracy, fundamental freedoms, and Jews in the face of a religion of intolerance, pathological Jew hatred, and Holocaust denial. On the other, the populism of the PVV reminded many of the rise of National Socialism and a Nazi propaganda machine, spewing vitriol and hatred for the Other, the ‘Eternal Jew’, a hatred this time directed at Europe’s other Other, Muslims.

After the formation of the new center-right government ensured that the anti-Islam and anti-immigrant agenda of Wilders’ Party of Freedom (PVV) would hijack the new government’s political agenda, Cohen publicly compared his (Jewish) mother’s gradual feeling of exclusion in the years leading up to the Second World War to the current circumstances affecting Muslims – a comparison he felt was apt given the fact that a party openly advocating the expulsion of Muslims was now in power (Visser, 2010). Not surprisingly, right and left, Cohen’s comparison between ‘his’ group and Muslims, between anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim xenophobia, was denounced as insensitive, misguided, distasteful, and dangerous. In the press, Cohen was accused of denying the uniqueness of the Holocaust and of trivializing genocide. Right-wing internet forums and blogs took to calling Cohen ‘Amsterdam’s decoy Jew’, a ‘fake Jew’ without real Jewish content (Cohen is not religious), personally to blame for the recent increase of anti-Semitic incidents because of his and his party’s misguided multi-culti politics.

The moral outrage greeting Cohen’s statement merits closer scrutiny. Cohen’s rhetorical doubling of Jews and Muslims presents a conjuring of the specter of dead Jews that localizes the specter’s excess in structural terms. If the Holocaust provides the moral compass of the new Europe, its lessons need to be universalized, and extend beyond the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the specificity of anti-Semitism and Jewish suffering to include all forms of exclusion, discrimination and intolerance. The (contested) rhetorical equivalence that is established in Cohen’s comparison between historical Jewish and contemporary European Muslim communities depends on a trans-historical framework that establishes analogies between different groups on the basis of their experience of exclusion. Moreover, it points to the legacy of European Christianity as a significant common source of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia (Bunzl, 2005: 501).

This framework of equivalency, Matti Bunzl shows, is similarly contested at the European level. It informed the decision of the European Union’s premier research institute and think tank on racism and xenophobia, the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia – EUMC, renamed Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) in 2007 – to repress a report the EUMC itself had commissioned from the Center for Research in anti-Semitism at Berlin’s Technical University. The report identified a coalition of ‘pro-Palestinian leftists, anti-globalization activists’, and ‘Muslim minorities in Europe, whether they be radical Islamist groups or young males from African descent’ as a ‘new source of anti-Semitism’. Challenging the report for stigmatizing European Muslim communities, the EUMC published a counter report in 2004, which called the resurgence of violent anti-Semitism a disturbing trend, but argued that much of the anti-Semitic agitation came from ‘young, disaffected white Europeans’ (Bunzl, 2005: 500).

EUMC framed its response in terms of its vision of a ‘pluralistic, supranational Europe as the most potent corrective to … genocidal nationalism’, and its corresponding motivation to ‘build … bridges between our different communities, especially those that are subjected to a range of hostile and discriminatory structures’. As the EUMC Management Board Chairman Robert Purkis put it:

Our perceptions of European identity are significant drivers of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. One of the similarities between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia is their historical relationship to a Europe perceived as exclusively Christian. Jews have of course suffered the most unspeakable crimes by European Christians. But it is true that all other religions, including Judaism and Islam, have been excised from the prevailing understanding of Europe’s identity as Christian and white. Both Islam and Judaism have long served as Europe’s ‘other’, as a symbol for a distinct culture, religion and ethnicity. (European Commission and EUMC, in Bunzl, 2005: 501)

What is at stake in the rhetorical twinning of Jews and Muslims, then, is a shift in focus from Muslim anti-Semitism to anti-Muslim xenophobia, and a broadening of the concept of racism which points beyond racially motivated political extremism, to the historical race-ing of religious non-Christian minorities in the Netherlands and Europe more generally. Not surprisingly, this challenges the core of Dutch self-understanding as ‘tolerant’, and redirects the attention from Muslim anti-Semitism to the exclusivist (white, Christian) strains within Europe’s dominant self-image as secular and inclusive (El Tayeb, 2011: 184). In Cohen’s doubling of Jews and Muslims, the specter of Jews breaks through dominant repressions to suggest analogies and trans-valuations, typically disavowed in the service of the sanctification of the present and downplayed as ‘xenophobia’ or ‘Islamophobia’. The outrage greeting his statements also speaks to the conviction that because of Europe’s commitment to anti-racism and racism’s expulsion from the public arena, European societies are fundamentally ‘post-racial’ (Hesse, 2007; Goldberg, 2006).

Cohen’s comparison is echoed in the appropriation or, as some might say, displacement of Jews in such statements as ‘Muslims are the new Jews of Europe’ (as proposed by Islam scholar Reza Azlan, for instance), or in the comment of Shahid Malik, Britain’s first Muslim minister, that ‘as a consequence of the growing culture of hostility against Muslims in the UK’, many ‘feel like the Jews of Europe’, making clear that ‘he was not equating the situation with the Holocaust’ – but that many British Muslims now felt like ‘aliens in their own country’ (Balibar, 1991b: 52; Hammerschlag, 2010: 23; Milho, 2008; Cooper, 2010).

Statements such as these tend to be readily dismissed as historically inaccurate, and politically and philosophically problematic, if not offensive, forms of identity politics that appropriate the figuration of ‘the Jew’ as the emblem of innocent victimhood, and reformulate the ‘injury’ of historical exclusion as the (morally pristine) ground for a claim for recognition (Brown, 1995: 75; Hammerschlag, 2010: 22). Yet given the fact that the Shoah and anti-Semitism have been universalized to provide the reigning paradigm of race and racism (and anti-racism) in Europe, it stands to reason that the interrogations and contestations of Europe’s contemporary practices of racial in/exclusion are likely to be conducted within these terms. Moreover, in a context in which Islamophobia or anti-Muslim sentiment generally flies under the radar of what is generally recognized as racism (because Muslims are recognized as a religious, not a racial group), the comparison between Jews and Muslims as (historically racialized) religious minorities has political and heuristic value (Goldberg, 2006). The comparison forces open the hegemonic configuration of racism as based on biology and ideological extremism, to include racialization based on religion and culture.

Figurations of ‘the Jew’, as Sarah Hammerschlag points out, have always been in excess of religious or biological definitions. Indeed, they have been characterized by their instability. ‘Whatever the political ideal, the Jew was its antithesis’ (2010: 7). For the Enlightenment, with its investment in universalism and civilization, the Jew was a symbol of particularism, a backward-looking, pre-modern tribal culture of outmoded customs and religious tutelage. For a nationalism based on roots, the distinctiveness of cultures, and allegiance to a shared past, the Jew was an uprooted nomad or a suspect ‘cosmopolitan’ aligned with ‘abstract reason rather than roots and tradition’ (2010: 7, 20).

This oscillation in figurations of the Jew points to the very ‘undecidability’ that, according to Etienne Balibar, David Goldberg and Barnor Hesse, is at the core of race. Indeed, anti-Semitism, for Balibar, constitutes the prototype of what has been variously called neo, cultural, or differentialist racism, a ‘racism without race’ characteristic of the post-colonial, ‘post-racist’ world, which takes culture, not biology, as root cause of ‘insurmountable differences’ (Balibar, 1991a; Gilroy, 1991; Goldberg, 2006; Hesse, 2007, 2011). All contemporary differentialist racism, Balibar claims, is a ‘generalized anti-Semitism’ (1991a: 24).

It is true that the discourse that sees in Islam (and Muslim immigrants) a particularist, anti-democratic, intolerant obstacle to enlightened, universalist reason and modernity is eerily reminiscent of Voltaire’s anti-Semitic diatribes against Judaism as a backward, unenlightened, intolerant religion (Hammerschlag, 2010: 28). But this comparison between Jews and Muslims, and between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, reads racism primarily as an internal supplement to nationalism, or to a nationalism transferred to the European level (Balibar, 1991b). It disinherits an alternative, colonial ‘lineage’ of race and state racism, and fails to take into account its hauntings in the post-colonial context of Europe’s minority populations and contemporary European migration flows, which have brought the empire, and modes of colonial governmentality, ‘home’ (Hesse, 2011: 164).

Indeed, the foregrounding of race as biological ascription and of anti-Semitism and the Shoah as the template of racism obscures, according to Barnor Hesse, the colonial functioning of race as a cognitive and administrative ‘shorthand’ for ordering and hierarchically demarcating and managing individuals and populations, and distinguishing between whiteness and non-whiteness (Hesse, 2004, 2011: 164). As Hesse argues, it was in the context of the mission to save the Enlightenment project as the basis for a universalist human rights regime and a reborn Europe that racism in the 1950s came to be conceptualized as an extremist ideology, fed by pseudo-scientific notions of biological ascription and racial hierarchy. The fact that the template for this understanding of race and racism was provided by the history of Nazi Germany (understood as an exceptional degeneration of national form peculiar to the German ‘Sonderweg’, the particular trajectory of German nationalism) meant that, as an aberrant, extremist phenomenon, it remained fundamentally extraneous to the Western ethos (Hesse, 2011: 162, 168).

The postwar public exorcism of race and racism moreover hinged on a truncated, individualized and psychologized understanding of racism as ‘race-thinking’ and ‘prejudice’, seen as a ‘pathology’ or a warped individual or collective belief (manipulable by a ‘charismatic’ leader) rather than as embedded in biopower and the realm of the social. It fits in with the liberal grammar of a society composed of autonomous individuals, engaging in rational speech and free from constraints imposed by ascribed or group identity (Hesse, 2004; Sayyid, 2010: 5; Dzenovska, 2010; Brown, 2006).

As a form of colonial governmentality, however, race operated along both the poles of regulatory, conditional (and conditioning) inclusion, and exclusion. Race’s normalizing inside was predicated on its constitutive, deviant and pathologized outside. Its biopolitical orientation towards racial uplift, discipline and racial hygiene contained its necropolitics of racial segregation and extermination (Hesse, 2004; Mdembe, 2003). Rule rather than exception, bureaucratic routine rather than political extremism, constitutive of Europe and all that it stands for (humanism, liberalism, individualism) rather than ‘external’ to Europe, it was this form of racial governmentality, Hesse suggests, that boomeranged into Europe, to condemn Jews (and gypsies and gays) to social death and extermination (2010: 164, 160). Only then, Aimé Césaire argued already in 1955, did the routine dehumanization of European colonial procedures become objectionable (Césaire, 1972: 2–3).

The repression of this alternative genealogy of race and racism explains why Job Cohen, committed to the universalist implications of the legacy of the Holocaust and vocally opposed to the racist aspects of Wilders’ rhetoric and politics, remains blind to the biopolitical, racializing logic of his and his party’s own positions toward immigrants, civic integration and the civilizing discourse of tolerance. It is the effect of the collusion of the ‘disabled history’ of colonialism, and the erasure of race (and the racist state) in the fantasy of multicultural, post-racist societies as tolerant, hospitable, open-minded and loving. In this fantasy, the failure of multiculturalism is that of a lover taken advantage of, because ‘we’ celebrated the Other’s difference without asking enough in return (Ahmed, 2008; Stoler, 2011).

Embedded in the haunting of Europe’s dead Jews, then, lies the haunting of a disavowal and a disinheritance: the origins of a Europe whose self-definition as Christian and white was shaped by the colonial encounter yet whose constitutive racialization is covered over by its avowed universalist ethos (Hesse, 2007: 657). The continued disavowal of race in the name of universalism and tolerance, the Christian bias lurking behind Europe’s self-identification as secular, and the sequestering of Europe’s colonial histories and their racial coordinates from Europe’s so-called ‘immigrant problem’ enable Europe to maintain the ‘internalist narrative’ of a homogeneous, self-contained entity driven by universalist principles, through which it naturalizes Western hegemony (Hesse, 2011: 58; El Tayeb, 2011; Hall, 1991).

The Phantasmagoria of the Cosmopolitan Homo Europeanus

If the conceptualization of racism as political extremism saved Enlightenment universalism as the ethical ground of a redeemed postwar Europe, the European Union itself was hailed as the embodiment, in geographical/historical space, of the promise of universal history as the overcoming of the excesses of nationalism through a progressive unfolding of reason (Da Silva, 2011). In a 2004 speech, Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, exemplifies this European self-understanding:

The horror of the Shoah and the terrible loss of life caused by the Second World War deeply marked Europe’s founding fathers. … They set out to make sure the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s could never return. The European idea was based on the firm determination to make sure the Europe of the future would be different – a Europe of peace, tolerance and respect for human rights. A Union of diversity where differences are accepted and perceived as enriching the whole. My personal commitment to the European idea stems from the deep conviction that this is the right way forward for our continent. That is why the first thing I did after my investiture as President of the European Commission was to visit Auschwitz. (Prodi, 2004)

However, everywhere in this ‘new’ post-national, post-racial Europe, Paul Silverstein has suggested, entrenched nationalistic and racialized tropes that once applied to Jews, and opposed sedentary and nomadic, rooted and uprooted, cosmopolitan and provincial, modern and backward, are resuscitated to support the characterization of migrants and their children as nationally and ‘Europeanly’ suspect (Silverstein, 2008). Indeed, within this framework, the trope of Jewish cosmopolitanism is resuscitated to enjoy pride of place as the model for an idealized Homo Europeanus. As Romani Prodi explains:

In many ways [Jews] are the first, the oldest Europeans. We, the new Europeans, are just starting to learn the complex art of living with multiple allegiances – allegiance to our hometown, to our own region, to our home country, and now to the European Union. The Jews have been forced to master this art since antiquity. They were both Jewish and Italian, or Jewish and French, Jewish and Spanish, Jewish and Polish, Jewish and German. Proud of their ties with Jewish communities throughout the continent, and equally proud of their bonds with their own country. (Prodi, 2004; Bunzl, 2005: 502)

In the idealized self-conception of Europe as post-national, post-racial and cosmopolitan, the hailing of Jews as ‘original Europeans’, forbears of a mode of belonging ‘beyond the nation-state’, not only confers a postmortem badge of whiteness on Jews (and in doing so certifies Europe’s redemption of being ‘beyond’ race). It also inscribes Jews into the self-conceptualization of the European Union, there to certify the fulfillment of the promise of progressive history and universal Reason. However, Prodi’s diasporic model of European belonging does not extend to actual support for the idea of multiple belonging and multiple citizenship, or to an understanding of the incongruities experienced by European de-territorialized migrant and minority populations faced with increasingly restrictive, culturalist modes of national belonging (El Tayeb, 2011: 51). Quite the contrary, Nina Glick-Schiller suggests. It formulates a normative, regularized diasporicity that is conceptualized as a ‘long-distance nationalism’, based on long distance ‘blood ties’ to a ‘homeland’. The model for this interpretation of the concept of diaspora, she argues, is Israel with its biological conception of the nation as a ‘homeland’ for all Jews, expressed in the law of return (2005: 528). Diasporic identity, from this perspective, fetishizes the idea of a peoplehood linked by genealogy and descent. This interpretation lends support to the differentiation of migrant populations (European, Western, non-Western), and the externalization of diasporic communities, marking even second or third generation migrants as ‘allochtonen’, im-mobil(ized) in their ghettoes and cités, and suspicious in their loyalty to a backward culture and a distant ‘home’ (El Tayeb, 2011: 51; Stehle, 2006).

Moreover, Prodi’s hailing of the normative de-territorialized European subject is mediated by the highly uneven mobilities of the new European migration regime. This differential regime is predicated on the ‘flexible’ and differential management of mobility in Europe, and contingent on the selective in/exclusion of migrants in the space of European citizenship (on the basis of skills and ‘cultural competencies’). It regulates its production of a stratified and racialized immigrant population with the application of a diversified biopolitical arsenal of ‘administrative techniques of control’ and ‘capacity building programs’ such as disciplinary integration (Mezzadra, 2010; Hesse, 2007: 658).

The cosmopolitan European-to-be, then, represents the differentialist template of European governmentality, operating through the construction of a model Europe as a neo-liberal, borderless space of free movement, and the normative construction of a ‘free’, white, mobile, de-territorialized yet loyal European consumer subject. As a differentialist norm, Homo Europeanus proliferates borders, exclusions, externalities, and the truncated (im)mobilities of the economically disadvantaged and racially marked (Balibar, 2004; Verstraete, 2010). As a rule(r) of difference, he incites certain bodies to life, while consigning others to death. (Pujar, 2007: xxvi).

The ‘spectropolitics’ of European unification conjures up a Homo Europeanus, who domesticates his (exterminated) forbear, the cosmopolitan European Jew, under erasure, posthumously inscribing him/her into the patrimony of Europe, and consigning him/her to (after) life. The aporia of Europe’s self-understanding has never been expressed more clearly than in the troping of the Jew as the exemplary cosmopolitan, inherited and harnessed by a discourse of European identity for the purpose of excluding other migrants and transnationals (Balibar, 2004: 14).

Yet the whole(some)ness of a Europe revitalized by this act of contrition/tribulation/filiation is a phantasmagoria. It is the site of a rupture (the ‘fatal anachrony’ of a ‘time out of joint’) and of a split: of the (humanist, universalist, European) spirit, inhabited by a specter that keeps generating new hauntings of past, present and future exclusions which cannot be owned (up to), because they are constitutive of Europe and all it stands for. It is the site of a displacement, in which the remembered past disables other histories, enabling new exclusions and rituals of purification. And it is the site of a call for justice and for ‘a new thinking of borders, a new experience of the house, the home, and the economy’ (Derrida, 1994: 140–1, 219).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their generous and insightful comments on previous drafts of this article.

Esther Romeyn is Senior Lecturer in the Center for European Studies at the University of Florida. Her work broadly interrogates the politics of identity and belonging in Europe and the United States, in particular focusing on the city, performance, theater, film and art. Besides Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924 (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), her recent publications include ‘Asylum Seekers, Citizenship and Reality TV in the Netherlands: Quizzing Refugees in Jeopardy’ (Citizenship Studies, forthcoming).

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