Brutal Kindness and Stranger Making
physical labour
spiritual inheritance
symbiosis with nature
A significant part of loss participation comes with an understanding of belonging. Those things, people and places for whom we grieve must have in some way have been assigned some sort of place in the order of selfhood, a sense of where it should be and why. The loss of that thing creates the chasm of former-ness and disregulation of that order. What is it to belong? How do we decide what belongs? Those scissors belong in the cutlery drawer. Why?
Is the process of assigning belonging akin to the process of un-belonging? Do we make kin and make strangers in the same breath?
The unstated politics of
stranger making in Europe:
A brutal kindness
European Journal of Cultural Studies
2016, Vol. 19(4) 335 –351
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1367549415592896
Abstract
Drawing on the works of Ahmed, Balibar and Appadurai, this article explores
the complex dynamics of stranger making in Europe, with particular focus on the
status of immigrants who are marked by systemic racialization. The article offers
brief analyses of a series of ‘critical incidents’ to illustrate contemporary enactments
of stranger making politics in order to examine how theorizations of race and
racialization may be shifting in European contexts. It argues that specific notions of
nationalism and national identity are being re-configured in the current neoliberal
climate of European Union austerity and civil unrest to reify a national ‘us’ against
those who must be made ‘stranger’.
Keywords
Cultural superiority, exceptionalism, nationalism, race, stranger making
Corresponding author:
Michelle Nicolson, Faculty of Education, University of Oulu, P.O. Box 2000, Yliopistokatu 9,
Oulu, FI-90014, Finland.
Email: michelle.nicolson@oulu.fi336 European Journal of Cultural Studies 19(4)
Introduction
A stranger experience can be an experience of becoming noticeable, of not passing through or
passing by, of being stopped or being held up. A stranger experience can teach us about how
bodies come to feel at home through the work of inhabitance, how bodies can extend themselves
into spaces creating contours of inhabitable space, as well as how spaces can be extensions of
bodies. (Ahmed, 2012: 3)
Sara Ahmed (2012) affirms that remembering unpleasant experiences of racialized ‘not
belonging’, which we often want to forget, offers possibilities for political re-orientation.
In her case, recalling such experiences led her to focus on the ‘politics of stranger mak-
ing’: ‘how some and not others become strangers, how emotions of fear and hatred stick
to certain bodies, how certain bodies become understood as the rightful occupants of
certain spaces’ (p. 2). Because racism as a systemic phenomenon is frequently disa-
vowed, she suggests that accounting for racism is to offer accounts of the world that
make visible the edges of social experience. Ahmed’s (2012) work prompts the question
of how a declared rejection of racism becomes a wall of resistance to addressing racism.
Drawing on the works of Ahmed, Balibar and Appadurai, this article explores the com-
plex dynamics of stranger making outlined by Ahmed, placing particular focus on the
status of immigrants who are marked by systemic racialization in Europe.
We offer brief analyses of a series of ‘critical incidents’ to illustrate contemporary
enactments of stranger making politics in order to examine how the politics of race and
racialization may be shifting in European contexts, with a particular focus on the Finnish
setting. Our first critical incident refers to the dynamic of stranger making in a European
Union (EU) expansion advertisement. We draw on Appadurai’s (2006) analysis of the
role of nationalism and discourses of competition, scarcity and crises in the activation
of ethnocidal violence to illustrate Ahmed’s (2004, 2012) idea of the ‘sticking of fear to
certain bodies’. Next, we offer an overview of a cluster of recent incidents in Finland
using Balibar and Wallerstein’s (1991) concept of shadow power to indicate ways
through which, as Ahmed describes, ‘certain bodies and not others become strangers’.
We conclude this article with a poem about the lived experience of ‘being made stran-
ger’ as a response to the collective culture of silence and denial that emerges when
bodies perceived to be rightful occupants of certain spaces are confronted with incom-
mensurable difference.
Stranger making in Europe
The EU advertisement ‘Growing Together’, which was released (and withdrawn) in
2011, illustrates the macro-context of this article. In the ad, a White European woman
dressed in yellow (the colours of the European stars in the EU flag) walks peacefully into
a dark warehouse. She hears a gong and as she looks behind her, she realizes she is about
to be attacked by a Chinese kung fu wrestler. Another attacker carrying a sword levitates
towards her from a different direction, dressed to represent the Kalaripayattu martial art
from the Indian State of Kerala. The last attacker to encircle the woman is a black man
with dreadlocks who enters the scene using Brazilian capoeira martial art moves. She
fearlessly stares at the men before her, takes a deep breath and multiples herself to formNicolson et al. 337
a circle around the men. Once they are outnumbered, the men drop their weapons and sit
down within the circle. A camera shot from above shows the men disappearing as the
clones of the woman turn into the stars of the EU flag.
The ad can be understood in part as a response to growing sentiments against the EU
in Europe as financial crises have exposed the fragility of interconnected markets operat-
ing under a post-national form of global capitalism. In this context, in addition to attrib-
uting blame to the EU, a common response from national populist parties has been to
treat immigrants as scapegoats responsible for the current crises (Appadurai, 2006). We
suggest that in an effort to displace the blame and create common ground around shared
‘enemies’, the EU directorate deployed similarly stereotypical (and arguably racist)
tropes as the populist parties. We suggest that the kind of scapegoating that is exempli-
fied by this ad reproduces the racial dynamic that results in the ‘sticking of fear to certain
bodies’ (Ahmed, 2004, 2012) with vast implications for ‘strangers’ both inside and out-
side the boundaries of the nation state and of ‘fortress Europe’ (Geddes, 2000).
Arjun Appadurai (2006) locates the root of this problem in nationalist discourses that
can be (and have been) extremely productive in processes of national reconstruction
(particularly after WW2), that flourish in years of abundance, but that work very differ-
ently in neoliberal times of austerity. Appadurai asserts that all nationalist discourses
carry within them the seeds of genocide. This is the case because nationalist discourses
rely on two interlocking tenets: the conviction that its populace is both ethnically homo-
geneous and exceptional; and the certainty of the sovereignty of the modern nation state
(relatively similar tenets operate in the case of the EU). The belief in ‘distinctive and
singular peoples grow[ing] out and control[ing] well defined national territories’ (p. 6)
relies on a denial of the process of construction of the national ethnos itself:
[the] idea of a national ethnos, far from being a natural outgrowth of this or that soil, has been
produced and naturalized at great cost, through rhetorics of war and sacrifice, through punishing
disciplines of educational and linguistic uniformity, and through the subordination of a myriad
of local and regional traditions (p. 4).
The denial of the constructed nature of nationalism is necessary for the creation of the
experience of security in belonging to a homogeneous ethnic polity and the reassurance
that this polity’s sovereignty guarantees a level of certainty and predictability in the
future. In times of prosperity, when this shared experience is normalized, foreigners are
not seen to pose too much of a threat to the polity. Skilled foreigners who seem to share
the social consensus of national exceptionalism, and who have skills that can be used in
the advancement of national aspirations, are invited in and are welcome.
However, economic globalization (i.e. the expansion of global financial capitalism)
poses complex and contradictory demands to this scenario. On the one hand, globalized
markets demand fast-paced economies driven by innovation. In this sense, immigrants
with new and different skills can be seen as the solution that will help a country ‘catch
up’ and ‘keep up’ with the mythical image of a global knowledge society/economy
(Hartmann, 2010; Nokkala, 2006; Ozga and Jones, 2006). On the other hand, the freer
flows of people and finances expose the heterogeneity of the national ethnos, the fragility
of national economies, the illusion of economic sovereignty of the nation state and the338 European Journal of Cultural Studies 19(4)
precarity of the sense of security, certainty and predictability promised by these institu-
tions. In this case, the anxieties of facing internal difference and ‘impurity’ (often histori-
cally repressed) and fears of loss of autonomy, increased inequality and lack of security
are projected as racialized anger onto the image of the immigrant. Delanty et al. (2008)
argue that, particularly in the last 15 years, political movements have seen a tendency for
both right and left political parties to shift to a ‘midway position’ between notions of
social democracy and the needs of the global market. This has allowed new political par-
ties to use the anxieties described by Appadurai (2006) as a means to mobilize support
and reassert ethno-nationalism within popular political discourses.
The racialized attribution of negative affects (particularly fear and anger) that have
arisen in the context of European economic austerity and precarity operates within what
Ahmed (2004) calls an ‘affective economy’. Although affects are not located within indi-
viduals but rather circulate between them, because affective economies are shaped and
oriented by social histories certain affects ‘stick’ to, and are therefore attributed as com-
ing from, certain bodies. Within a racialized affective economy in particular, negative
affects are often attributed to markedly racialized bodies. In response, these bodies may
be subject to pre-emptive violence, restrictions on movement and other efforts to ensure
the safety and security of those bodies who understand themselves to be the objects of
potential danger, and who have the power to guard against their perceived vulnerability
(Ahmed, 2003).
On the other hand, according to Mouffe (2005), the political passion of populist
orientations is only a problem when captured by right-wing parties that camouflage their
agendas by offering a false alternative to the status quo based on fear. Mouffe suggests
that populism, as the creation of a collective will, could help the left connect with and
mobilize across sectors against neoliberal globalization. She sees populism as a neces-
sary dimension of a pluralist conception of democracy as it fosters passion, as the
affective dimension of politics. According to Mouffe (2005), this political passion can be
mobilized in progressive ways away from fear, towards hope, by offering real alterna-
tives to growing levels of inequalities and to the destruction of the welfare state. While
acknowledging Mouffe’s contribution to this debate, we believe that the mobilization of
desires towards modern ideals of hope and unity in consensus also needs to be histori-
cized and problematized, even when deployed in seemingly benevolent ways.
Racism without race
In the context presented so far, race as a ‘sociological signifier’ representing those to be
hated, mistrusted or feared has been materialized through the image of those who pose a
threat to the nation (i.e. immigrants and internal minorities). However, this racial materi-
alization is a phenomenon that is commonly denied in European contexts. This happens
through a (legitimate) disavowal of the concept of race as a biological construct.
However, this disavowal of race quickly becomes a denial of the social fact of racism.
Goldberg (2006) traces the European denial of the concept of race as a category applica-
ble to human groups to the aftermath of WW2:
For Europeans, race is not, or really is no longer. European racial denial concerns wanting race
in the wake of World War II categorically to implode, to erase itself. This is a wishful evaporationNicolson et al. 339
never quite enacted, never satisfied. A desire at once frustrated and displaced, racist implications
always lingering and diffuse, silenced but assumed, always already returned and haunting,
buried but alive. Race in Europe has left odourless traces but ones suffocating in the wake of
their at once denied risinous stench. (p. 334)
Goldberg (2002) calls ‘racelessness’ the normalization of racism, implying ‘not the
end of racial consciousness but its ultimate elevation to the given’ (p. 236):
Racelessness is the neoliberal attempt to go beyond – without (fully) coming to terms with –
racial histories and their accompanying racist inequities and iniquities; to mediate the racially
classed and gendered distinctions to which those histories have given rise without reference to
the racial terms of those distinctions; to transform, via the negating dialectic of denial and
ignoring, racially marked social orders into racially erased ones. (p. 221)
In his analysis of the denial of race, Balibar and Wallerstein (1991) suggest that hier-
archical differences between cultures bear clear signs of variants of an Enlightenment
(racialized) narrative of the ‘White man’s burden’. Balibar illustrates this with the French
variant of this narrative:
[the] idea that the culture of the ‘land of the Rights of Man’ has been entrusted with a universal
mission to educate the human race. There corresponds to this mission a practice of assimilating
dominated populations and a consequent need to differentiate and rank individuals or groups in
terms of their greater or lesser aptitude for – or resistance to – assimilation. (p. 34)
Balibar argues that European forms of racism that deny race as a biological feature
and therefore claim not to reproduce racism still enact cultural hierarchies grounded in
colonial thinking. In cultural (neo)racism, assimilation is still perceived as progress and
emancipation. In (racist) attempts to protect Europe from ‘Third Worldization’, human-
ity is still divided into two main groups:
[one] assumed to be universalistic and progressive, the other supposed irremediably
particularistic and primitive […] The cultures supposed implicitly superior are those which
appreciate and promote ‘individual’ enterprise, social and political individualism, as against
those which inhibit these things. (p. 25)
Balibar and Wallerstein (1991) describe racism as ‘a true total social phenomenon’,
which materializes in many forms of violence and oppression, justified by discourses
that call for purification or preservation of collective identities, or for protection against
contamination, articulated around the ‘stigmata of otherness’. As Appadurai (2006) indi-
cates, recent economic crises and the imposition of regimes of austerity have fuelled
discourses where increasingly immigrants are perceived to be the root of economic prob-
lems (see also Andreotti et al., 2015). These discourses transform many social problems,
such as unemployment, education, criminality and so on, into those that are, if not cre-
ated, at least aggravated by immigrant presence. This consequently promotes the ideol-
ogy that the solution to such problems lies in the prevention or reduction of immigration
and the expulsion of those deemed ‘difficult’, ‘unacceptable’ or unable to assimilate into
the dominant consensus of cultural (national) norms.340 European Journal of Cultural Studies 19(4)
Increased mobility both within the EU and in the wider global context is changing the
population demographic of most European countries to varying extents. According to
Delanty et al. (2008), it appears that smaller European countries, of a strong liberal tradi-
tion, are finding it most difficult to adjust to the demographic changes taking place within
national populations. Having been previously ‘protected’ from any large-scale migration
or immigration, in these countries, democracy and capitalism have been defined and
developed with a strong ethos of nation building and nationhood, as described by
Appadurai (2006). Current modes of globalization and trends of Europeanization have
resulted in an uncomfortable challenge to such national and cultural assumptions. These
countries display a complex mix of liberal values and xenophobia where racism is nor-
malized and the concept of race becomes indeed redundant as liberal values are inverted
when it comes to immigrants: multiculturalism turns into a defence of national culture
(perceived to be under threat), and people invoke the idea of tolerance precisely to keep
communities separate (Delanty et al., 2008).
Appadurai (2006) emphasizes that narratives of majoritarianism and racialized
nationalism are mobilized even in (seemingly) inclusive, democratic and secular nation
states when the salt pillars of nationalism are threatened by the waters of globalization
that blend two subsurface currents: the latent logics of uncertainty (of a sovereign state)
and of incompleteness (of a homogeneous national ethnos). This triggers a strategy of
double denial: believers in nationalism deny not only the precarity of its tenets but also
their response to the exposure of the internal heterogeneity that is routinely denied. This
creates a cycle of ‘surplus rage’ enacted in racist and sometimes ethnocidal scapegoat-
ing of immigrants and minorities (Appadurai, 2006). In this process, racism and the
scapegoating itself are vehemently denied, in an effort to protect both individual and
national positive self-image. We suggest that this analysis is apt for Nordic countries
more generally, and Finland in particular, which is the focus of the critical incidents
examined in the next section.
Stranger making in Finland
Critical analyses focusing on race and racism in Nordic countries are starting to emerge
in Nordic languages and in English (see Jensen, 2012; Loftsdóttir and Jensen, 2012;
Puuronen, 2011; Rastas, 2012, 2013). These authors, however, face strong local resist-
ance based on narratives of Nordic exceptionalism that dissociates the region from
colonial or neo-colonial history (i.e. there is popular public consensus that ‘there is no
problem here’). This exceptionalism relies on a denial of the fact that colonization was
not only something happening in faraway places but is also at the heart of European
culture (Mignolo, 2000). It also denies that Nordic countries have participated exten-
sively in economic exploitation, cultural oppression and instrumental knowledge
production in support of colonial and neo-colonial projects, both domestically and
abroad (see Eidsvik, 2012; Guðjónsdóttir, 2014; Kuokkanen, 2010; Loftsdóttir and
Jensen, 2012; Vuori, 2009).
The surge of reactive nationalism triggered by events and discourses related to
crises and austerity has resulted in the rewiring of old hierarchies to the point where
even the terms ‘immigration’ and ‘multiculturalism’ incite hysterical responses and areNicolson et al. 341
increasingly becoming the new signifiers of racism (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991;
Hubinette, 2012; Rastas, 2012). These emerging nationalist movements are character-
ized by acts of violence, both physical and symbolic, towards undesirable ‘others’
(Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). Like Appadurai, Balibar argues that nationalism is
invariably either the sole cause of racism or at least the determining condition of its
production, as was epitomized in the massacre of 77 young people in Norway in July
2011 by Anders Behring Breivik.
The dynamic (and complex) association of racism and nationalism (see Balibar and
Wallerstein, 1991) forms a fertile basis to analyse a series of telling incidents related to
racism in Finland. Finland is a country that has a complex history and that, in the past
200 years, has been marked by a major civil war, Swedish colonization, Russian annexa-
tion and German occupation. A strong nationalist project grounded on ethnic egalitarian-
ism and committed to class elimination emerged after WW2, but geographical,
ideological, ethnic, cultural and linguistic vulnerabilities (particularly in relation to
Russia during the cold war) have left enduring marks in the national imaginary of people
living in a land of harsh climate, seemingly in constant siege (see also Andreotti et al.,
2015). The strong social/national consensus on a project of ethno-social democracy
relies partly on the elimination and/or domestication of internal dissent, and the construc-
tion and safeguarding of a positive sense of ethnic/national homogeneity.
Finland was the last Nordic country to open its borders to immigration in the mid-
1990s for economic and humanitarian purposes (see, for example, Mullinari et al., 2009).
Recent social and political changes framed by neoliberal re-structuring have started to
undermine the viability of Finland’s strong welfare state. In this context, ideas of insular-
ity and independence have been captured by populist groups whose campaigns portray
immigrants, multiculturalism and internationalization as the root causes of social–
economic scarcity and vulnerability (Vuori, 2009), and the erosion of liberal values such
as freedom of expression (Rossi, 2009). In this context, the perceived loss of national
autonomy mobilizes historical sentiments of opposition to past colonial rule, resulting in
a populist discourse of traditional Finnish resistance to foreign oppression and subjuga-
tion (Andreotti et al., 2015).
In our analysis of recent incidents in Finland, we present event summaries that we
created by synthesizing their description within mainstream media reports. We chose
these incidents based on their ability to illustrate both the recent surge in racist actions
that are taking place in the Finnish context, as well as the discourses that are being circu-
lated to incite, justify and respond to these actions:
2012: A Finnish parliamentarian, from a Finnish nationalist party, was quoted by a national
newspaper as having used the N-word as a racial slur to describe immigrants. In a media
interview, the MP is quoted as having said that refugees are lazy and should be put to work
‘clearing up forests … in the sleet’ and be sent to live in the countryside. He said that in his own
work in various countries as a forestry consultant, he had noticed people of European descent
worked harder. This was the second time the MP had been criticised for using the N-word in the
space of two months. In the previous charge the MP complained about the number of immigrants
arriving in Finland warning Finnish people that mosques would be built all over Helsinki
disturbing people’s peace with calls to prayer (which he mimicked in a mocking way). The MP342 European Journal of Cultural Studies 19(4)
defended his words and action saying he was from the countryside and that people talked more
frankly in the countryside.
2012: A young Moroccan man was shot dead, at close range, by a Finnish man, inside the
pizzeria where he worked in Oulu. The young man was speaking in Arabic to another customer
when a small altercation started between the young man and a Finnish customer over the use of
Arabic in public spaces in Finland. The young man decided to ignore the Finnish customer who
felt aggravated and then shot both Arabic speakers, killing one of them. While the incident itself
pointed to security risks for immigrants and linguistic intolerance, what followed exposed the
magnitude of the problem in Finland. An elected city councilman from the nationalist party,
which achieved unprecedented success in becoming the third largest party in parliament in
2011, wrote on social media that the killer should be awarded a medal for gunning down an
enemy (in the war against Islam), just as any soldier who accomplishes some heroic feat in
battle would be duly decorated. The councillor was punished by his party for using hate speech.
This triggered two opposing types of popular protests: protests against racial violence, and
protests in favour of ‘freedom of expression’ (based on the perception that what the councillor
expressed was a popular feeling).
2013: During a book launch at the city library in Jyvaskyla a group of young men self identified
as ‘patriots’ forced their entry into the event. The book about ‘The Finnish far Right’, which
dealt with issues of multiculturalism, gave the young men the reason to protest in public. The
refusal of entry incited abuse and aggression. In the scuffle that ensued one security guard was
stabbed with a knife, and the group also used bottles as weapons in the attack. The group fled
the scene of the incident before the police arrived. The police treated the event as aggravated
assault.
The most common response to these incidents in Finland (in the media and in per-
sonal communications) was to individualize racism, articulated in the argument that
because Finnish people are not and cannot be racist, only ‘abnormal’ Finnish people can
perform such ‘absurd’ acts. The normative character in this response, grounded on
Finnish exceptionalism, enacts a curious double role. On the one hand, if racism is an
individual phenomenon, it needs to be dealt with solely at an individual level. In this
sense, racism is perceived as a mis-representation or mis-recognition of the markedly
racialized Other: a cognitive issue that can be prevented by providing the individual
racist with more knowledge about the Other and a stronger commitment to individual
moral integrity. On the other hand, the affirmation that ‘we, the Finnish people, cannot
possibly be racist’ points to a different analysis of racism conceptualized as a mis-rep-
resentation of the nation (as exceptional and superior) generated by systemic and insti-
tutional forces and structures (such as nationalist discourses) and that depends on a
repeated construction of the Other as deficient (i.e. unexceptional and inferior) for its
legitimation, as Appadurai (2006) suggests. In this sense, the construction of positive
nationalist stereotypes that are reliant upon deep-seated and indispensible negative
assumptions about other nations will only contribute to the further denial of racism as a
systemic problem.
In the incidents, the war for ‘cultural integrity’ (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991) or eth-
nic completeness (Appadurai, 2006) normalizes racism as a standard (and commendable)
conduct by constructing immigrants as a threat to a pre-existing equality, which isNicolson et al. 343
perceived to be jeopardized by immigration. The argument about complicity in harm of
those who benefit from the reproduction of inequalities is turned on its head: immigrants
are constructed as the agents of inequality (not the victims), which triggers violent
responses, justified as a defence of ‘innocent’ entitlements (i.e. cultural purity, superiority,
ideas of exceptionalism). In this context, anti-racist arguments are perceived to be naive
and hypocritical and met with contempt and hostility by those who subscribe to the cru-
sade for the threatened freedom and equality represented in the status quo (Bell, 2004).
Furthermore, it may be that those who bring attention to a racist incident are accused of
being racist themselves, as if talking about racism was the cause of racism (Ahmed, 2012).
The book launch incident shows that ethnocidal violence is not only targeted at immi-
grants but also at those ‘insiders’ who embody the heterogeneity of the nation and expose
the false construction of ideals of purity and homogeneity. As Appadurai (2006) argues,
the anxiety produced by the collapse of ideals of ethnic completeness triggered by those
who could have bought into that project is perceived as cultural betrayal. Balibar and
Wallerstein (1991) call this a project of fictive ethnicity that is integral to nationalist
projects. Ironically, the discursive turn of such claims as ‘cultural betrayal’ results in the
transformation of those marginalized being distorted to those receiving ‘positive treat-
ment’ (Goldberg, 2002) at the exclusionary expense of the ‘national citizen’. This per-
ceived threat to the nationalist identity or completeness manifests in a need to reassert
who is in control in determining who is a stranger, who is a threat and whose bodies are
rightful occupants of the national space (Ahmed, 2004, 2012). Another incident,
2013: Councillors from the nationalist Finns Party in Lieksa, a small municipality in eastern
Finland, demand a new meeting space to avoid using one where a Somali group meets once a
month. The leader of the group demanded a ‘clean meeting room’, because a Somali working
group met on the same premises, but at different times. This happened a week after the health
and social affairs committee gave the Somali working group permission to use the meeting
space. The comments of the regional chair for this political party on the demands of the local
party leader were that, ‘[the local leader] might not have thought his actions through before
making his comments’.
In this incident, the problem is not conceived as (blatant) racist superiority, but in
terms of a misplaced comment in a public arena. The political party did not condemn the
local leader’s suggestion that Somali people would leave the room dirty. Instead, the
regional leader regretted that more consideration had not been taken as to where those
views were aired. Not in any way exclusive to Finnish society, racism has a hierarchy,
which allows some bodies to ‘be made stranger’ more acceptably than others, while all
the while denying racist intent in these claims (Ahmed, 2004, 2012). This denial, accord-
ing to Goldberg (2002), turns such racism into generic categories of class, culture, reli-
gion or ‘the immigrant problem’ – as such, ‘raceless racisms’ (p. 356). Once the idea of
immigrants as the ‘problem’ has national currency, there is a need to define those who are
immigrant or ‘other’ from those who are ‘ethnic nationals’ or ‘like us’:
2013: A Finns Party MP, who is also the chair of a nationalist ‘extreme right’ group submitted
a written request to the government for the collection of statistics on the size of different ethnic
groups in Finland. He proposed that the government begin collecting data on ethnic groups as344 European Journal of Cultural Studies 19(4)
part of a census every five years. The rationale for this census was that it would assist researchers
and policy makers with the changing demographics of Finnish society as ‘people belonging to
the same ethnic groups think and act in the same way’. The need for such a census was further
explained by the MP as being due to the inadequacy of the current system which ‘classifies a
person born in Finland as being of “immigrant background” only if both parents are born
abroad’. This he found problematic, as ‘the children of people born in Finland but of “immigrant
background” [shouldn’t] be counted as ethnically Finnish’.
The fact that the member of parliament (MP) in question is not only an MP for a
nationalist political party but can openly chair a nationalist group described by the
Finnish Security Police as extreme right indicates the intensified nationalization of
political discourse in relation to Finnish anxieties of facing internal difference and
‘impurity’. When this anxiety is mobilized, minorities become ‘[a] constant reminder of
the incompleteness of national purity’ (Appadurai, 2006: 84). This prompts the need not
only to ‘classify’ immigrants as ‘strangers’ in comparison to a homogeneous national
ethnos who ‘think and act in the same way’ but to make clear who might be descended
from strangers, so that we can also mark them as strangers. The aim seems to be the
reassurance that no imposters lay claim to equality, exceptionality or unconditional
inclusion within a precariously constructed notion of nationhood and Finnish ethnic
homogeneity.
Balibar and Wallerstein (1991) view the dynamic relationship between racism and
nationalism as one of ‘reciprocity of determination’ (p. 52). This can be observed in the
historical use of narratives of nationalism to transform antagonisms and persecutions
into modern forms of racism. In this sense, racism is a necessary component of national-
ism (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). The relationship is not of cause and effect but one
in which the two position each other and benefit from each other to achieve specific
goals. In general, racism reifies the idea of a ‘fictive ethnicity’ (p. 49) where myths of
originality and origination that ground national unity overshadow the heterogeneity of
histories of a specific group. On the other hand, nationalism provides integrity to racism,
which it projects, both towards the outside and the inside of the nation state, as a means
to mobilize people. Racism, according to Balibar, is therefore ‘not an expression of
nationalism but a supplement internal to nationalism, always in excess of it, but always
indispensable to its constitution, yet always insufficient to achieve its project’ (p. 52).
Racism also works in ambivalent ways. While serving as a useful means for national-
ism to deal with its internal historical contradictions, racism can also bring to nationalism
an ‘excess of purism’. This excess exposes the irrationality of the myth of national purity
and homogeneity and this may work against the assertion of nationalist claims:
2014: The chairman of Heinola, a small town in southern Finland announces that the town is
seeking 100 ‘good and healthy’ refugees to move to the town. The chairman said the exercise
is not related to cultural or humanitarian intents, but to achieving the minimum number of
residents needed for the town to retain autonomy over its social services. The town he said,
‘[does] not discriminate when it comes to ethnic background of the refugees’. The chairperson
describes his proposal as a less than perfect solution but is prepared to ‘accept any port in a
storm’ adding that, ‘Of course we would rather have Finns, but we have an emergency […] it
all comes down to numbers’. The chairman faces resistance from the population. A right wingNicolson et al. 345
group turned up in Heinola three weeks later to protest against the proposal and handed out
pamphlets titled ‘Let’s keep Heinola White’. The pamphlets condemned the settling of ‘racially
and culturally completely foreign refugees’ proposing instead that locals should be encouraged
to have children as a means of human capital, since refugees are not interested in working. It
also claimed that, ‘the politicians and the mainstream media want to accelerate non-white
immigration, using their self-induced depopulation as an excuse’, which leads to ‘white racial
suicide’. (Yle News January 21 2014- Etelä-Suomen Sanomat February 8 2014)
The series of events provides an interesting combination of racialized enunciations,
which on the surface may look just diametrically opposed, each working against the
objectives of the other. The chairman wants immigrants to come to Heinola while the
right-wing group wants them to stay out of the town to ‘keep it White’. Yet in their con-
tradictions, they both enact racial borders to the town community. The chairman wants
‘good and healthy’ immigrants and quickly reminds us that ‘Of course we would rather
have Finns, but we have an emergency … it all comes down to numbers’. His racial sig-
nification is implicit and piggybacks on the historical portrayal of the Other of Europe
being depreciated or defective thus the preferred immigrant has to be ‘good and healthy’.
The right-wing group also reminds us that the ‘refugees do not even provide labour’,
once again drawing attention to the historical/colonial portrayal of the depreciated stran-
ger of Europe. Refugees and immigrants are people hailing from heterogeneous back-
grounds, but for both the chairman and the right-wing group, racism provides ‘a historical
system of complementary exclusions and dominations which are mutually intercon-
nected’ (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991: 49). Between the grudging inclusion of the chair-
man and the outright rejection of the right-wing group, the place of the refugee and the
immigrant in Heinola is clearly marked on the exterior of that community.
The heritage of colonialism is, in reality, the fluctuating combination of continued
exteriorization and ‘internal exclusion’ (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991: 43). The racist
White is always the Other White and in the same vein colonial difference was always
inscribed parallel to imperial difference. Exclusion manifested in the right-wing group’s
outright rejection of immigrants is juxtaposed with assimilation in the begrudging
acceptance of immigrants by the chairman (‘we prefer Finns but we will have to make
do with good immigrants’) epitomizing ‘the ambivalence of the dual movement of
assimilation and exclusion […] which provides the backdrop against which representations
of race and ethnicity are played out’ (p. 43). The White man’s burden (the begrudging
acceptance of ‘the stranger’) inscribing the inner limits of ‘Whiteness’ as well as its
‘humanist’ shine hides its dark side, which is always necessary and complementary to it.
Racism can therefore be denied: ‘The town does not discriminate when it comes to ethnic
background of the refugees’.
This example highlights the ambivalence of race that both selectively includes
(good immigrants) and absolutely excludes (all immigrants are bad). The stranger
being always manufactured in shifting frontiers of capitalist imperialism, the frontiers
‘between two humanities, which seem incommensurable namely, the humanity of des-
titution and the humanity of consumption, the humanity of underdevelopment and that
of overdevelopment’ (p. 44). The ambivalence of the signifier of race under the contra-
dictions of exteriorization and internal exclusion becomes more complete, compelling346 European Journal of Cultural Studies 19(4)
and revealing when its relationship with humanist ideologies is examined. The implica-
tion of this is that it would not be so difficult to organize the struggle against racism in
the intellectual sphere if racism was not being perpetrated in the name of and by means
of a humanist ideology. Balibar and Wallerstein (1991) affirm that the critique of bio-
logical racism and its contemporary equivalents and substitutes are often misconstrued
to mean that racism is incompatible with humanism, yet racial categories and hierar-
chies are situated within the human race and regarded as being so (p. 59). The instru-
mentalization of refugees, to achieve the ends of the town (in keeping its financial
privileges), shows how power pervades even humanist discourses to achieve racialized
relations. Notions of equality, intercultural relations and justice get inflected by percep-
tions of humanity that judge other forms of humanity as being not quite human (Bhabha,
1994) based on belongingness to the nation from a nationalist point of view and a
Eurocentric historical imaginary.
Consequently, ‘equality within the nation-state […] has as its internal and external
limits the national community […] It is first and foremost an equality in respect of
nationality’ (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991: 50). The ‘nationals’ who are in the position
of power have the choice to select what rights they can afford refugees and immigrants,
and most importantly, upon which refugees they can be bestowed: the chairman’s strat-
egy was a less-than-perfect solution ‘simply aimed at achieving the minimum number of
residents needed for the town to retain autonomy over its social services’. The immi-
grants are therefore just numbers to meet local needs, they become an exterior needed in
the building and consolidation of an interior. In this case, ‘Tolerance expresses these
denials directly […] The refusal of equality – of standing, of outcome in the name of an
ecumenical largesse, a hostile generosity’ (Goldberg, 2006: 338) or ‘brutal kindness’.
In addition, Goldberg (2006) distinguishes between two racially driven economies
that help us to make sense of the series of events in Heinola, a ‘moral economy’ and a
‘political economy’. The moral economy enables Europe to view itself as ‘sustaining a
humanity struggling to meet moral standards it has set itself’ (p. 355). In the political
economy, ‘local politics of possibility’ gravitate between ‘access and begrudging, assim-
ilating acceptance […] and aggressive, even violent denial and restriction’ (Goldberg,
2006). The two economies unify the two halves of the incident that ordinarily are per-
ceived as historical contradictions. The instrumentalization of refugees also helps con-
tain anger and frustration among the ‘citizens’ whose rights are continually being eroded
under neoliberal governance and the current financial climate of defunding of public
services imposing a form of containment that squeezes the margins to save the middle
(Goldberg, 2006). The invitation of refugees is therefore at once one and the same with
the forces resisting the invitation, together they articulate the stranger, each necessary to
the other in their difference.
Ahmed (2004) argues that emotions play a crucial role in the ways that individuals
come together, and move towards or away in relation to others. Emotions are not merely
individual expressions but are located in movement, circulating between bodies. They
constitute borders of belonging and not belonging. The right-wing group invests in racial
emotions evoking the conjectural crisis of ‘White racial suicide’ which they claim are
caused by ‘politicians and mainstream media supporting non-White immigration, using
their self-induced depopulation as an excuse’. Here anger, fear and resentment areNicolson et al. 347
attached to those ‘refugee’, non-White (immigrant) bodies that must be expelled to
purify the social body, of those authorized to inhabit the national space, and prevent
‘White racial suicide’. The racialized stranger making process connects certain bodies
while disconnecting and distancing others. The metric of emotions of race or the ‘net-
work of affective stereotypes’ (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991: 20) conceals the heteroge-
neity of Finland (and Europe). In effect, the claim that nation states have different
cultures and speak different languages can only be achieved by ‘denying or repressing
ethnoracial heterogeneities within each country’ (Goldberg, 2006: 353). From this pro-
jection, the racial/cultural identity of the ‘true nationals’ remains invisible, but is always
inferred and ensured by the ‘visibility’ of the ‘false nationals’. However, this defining of
the true national becomes what Balibar and Wallerstein (1991) refer to as ‘the obses-
sional quest for a “core” of authenticity’ (p. 60) where the ‘false’ or stranger is that which
is ‘visible’, but through which the defining of the ‘true’ national becomes increasingly
difficult as more complex authentications of extreme racial purity are sought.
Conclusion
This article arises in the context of previous discussions around initiatives that attempt to
reject the concept of race, but that, ironically, tend to reproduce racist patterns of repre-
sentation and engagements (see Andreotti, 2011). In this sense, this article aimed to offer
a partial and situated response to Ahmed’s (2012) suggestion that initiatives that claim to
include Others are embedded in assumptions that reproduce violence and exclusion. We
started by outlining how neoliberalism and discourses and strategies of austerity are
shifting racialized discourses in Europe. We have highlighted how, within the racialized
affective economies of Europe, immigrants come to be identified as the cause of current
crises, and how in turn multiculturalism starts to be perceived as a threat to societal val-
ues (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991; Kershen, 2012).
We have offered examples of analyses of how this phenomenon of reactive ethno-
nationalism may be magnified in smaller countries such as Finland (Delanty et al., 2008).
We offered multiple analyses of how immigrants and immigration are ambivalently
represented in Finland to reify a division of humanity based on established cultural hier-
archies that create a racism that paradoxically denies race. In order to illustrate this
ambivalent juxtaposition of practices of stranger making that involve both welcome and
rejection in this type of raceless racisms (Goldberg, 2006), the excerpt of the
poem ‘Brutal Kindness’ below (written by the second author of this article) articulates
the paradoxical message communicated to immigrants by a dominant exceptionalist
national discourse, which, nonetheless, is not the only discourse upheld in the Finnish
national context.
---------------
Brutal Kindness
We welcome you in our nation
Our borders open only to a few348 European Journal of Cultural Studies 19(4)
We ask for nothing in return, except
That you recognize the deepest wisdom
That when in Rome, you must pay tribute to the Romans
Therefore, you must
speak our language
admire our deeds
share our dreams
obey our laws
respect our rules
embrace our values
fulfil our expectations
mimic our behaviour
praise our talents
strengthen our economy
aspire to be like us
commit to staying here
dedicate your life to serving our people
and be thankful for our efforts to help you
We chose you amongst countless others, we are happy you are here
Our gift to you is our generous hospitality
We ask for nothing in return, except
That you acknowledge the ineptitude of your traditions
And the natural exceptionality of ours
Therefore, you must
show good manners
strive for your best
work (for less) twice as hard
pay your duties
be clean and organized
dress appropriately, smell nice
use words that we can understand
know your place
do as you are told
recognize your debt to us
eat everything in your plate
lay low, be happy, focus on positive things
entertain us with your culture, when requested
and jump off the balcony, if required
We give you access to the best education and welfare in the world
Our systems are based on equality and human rights
We ask you for nothing in return, except
That you appreciate the privilege
Of being allowed amongst usNicolson et al. 349
Therefore, under no circumstance, should you
break our trust, bite the hand that feeds you
complain, express disapproval or discontent
expose our inadequacies, reveal our contradictions
disclose our fears, idiosyncrasies and insecurities
challenge our authority or understanding of reality
make up unreasonable accusations, question our principles
impose your meaning, attempt to restrain our speech
fuel internal dissent, speak of prohibited topics
intellectually or biologically inoculate unauthorized foreignness
defy our right to distinguish our heroes
outperform, outsmart, outshine us
reject our advice, incite questioning or scepticism
remind us of what we choose to deny
or speak of the past we want to forget
We will do everything in our power for you to properly fit in
Our extraordinary success was built on social trust, consensus and cohesion
We expect nothing in return, except
That you salute our openness, altruism and sense of justice
And sacrifice your difference for the greater collective good
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.
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Biographical notes
Michelle Nicolson is a doctoral student at the University of Oulu. Her research examines notions
of cultural exceptionality/superiority in the implementation of policies and practices of interna-
tionalization and development in higher education, with particular focus on social responsibility
and equity.
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global
Change. Her research examines political economies of knowledge production, discusses the ethics
of international development and explores policies and practices of globalism and internationaliza-
tion in education and in global activism, with an emphasis on representations of and relationships
with marginalized communities. She is a research fellow at the University of Oulu, where she was
chair of global education from 2010 to 2013.
Boby Fortune Mafi is a doctoral student at the University of Oulu. His research interests are in
cultural studies, and examine discourses of denial of racism in electronic social media, their
embeddedness in the colonial matrix of power and links to the development of subjectivities in
education.