The unstated politics of stranger making in Europe: A brutal kindness

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 making’: ‘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 disavowed, 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 complex 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 stranger’ 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 incommensurable 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 form 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 operating under a post-national form of global capitalism. In this context, in addition to attributing 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 exemplified 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 outside 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 differently 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 homogeneous 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 the precarity of the sense of security, certainty and predictability promised by these institutions. In this case, the anxieties of facing internal difference and ‘impurity’ (often historically 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 parties 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 individuals but rather circulate between them, because affective economies are shaped and oriented by social histories certain affects ‘stick’ to, and are therefore attributed as coming 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 necessary 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 alternatives 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 historicized 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 materialization 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 applicable 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 evaporation 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 hierarchical 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’, humanity 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) indicates, recent economic crises and the imposition of regimes of austerity have fuelled discourses where increasingly immigrants are perceived to be the root of economic problems (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 created, at least aggravated by immigrant presence. This consequently promotes the ideology 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.

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 tradition, 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 normalized 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 scapegoating 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 resistance 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 extensively 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 are increasingly becoming the new signifiers of racism (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991; Hubinette, 2012; Rastas, 2012). These emerging nationalist movements are characterized 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 annexation and German occupation. A strong nationalist project grounded on ethnic egalitarianism 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 construction 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 insularity 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 subjugation (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 circulated 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 MP 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 personal 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-representation of the nation (as exceptional and superior) generated by systemic and institutional 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 ethnic completeness (Appadurai, 2006) normalizes racism as a standard (and commendable) conduct by constructing immigrants as a threat to a pre-existing equality, which is 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 crusade 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 immigrants 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 treatment’ (Goldberg, 2002) at the exclusionary expense of the ‘national citizen’. This perceived 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, according to Goldberg (2002), turns such racism into generic categories of class, culture, religion 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 as 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 nationalism (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 nationalism 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 wing 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 contradictions, 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 signification 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 stranger of Europe. Refugees and immigrants are people hailing from heterogeneous backgrounds, but for both the chairman and the right-wing group, racism provides ‘a historical system of complementary exclusions and dominations which are mutually interconnected’ (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991: 49). Between the grudging inclusion of the chairman 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 destitution and the humanity of consumption, the humanity of underdevelopment and that of overdevelopment’ (p. 44). The ambivalence of the signifier of race under the contradictions of exteriorization and internal exclusion becomes more complete, compelling and revealing when its relationship with humanist ideologies is examined. The implication 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 biological racism and its contemporary equivalents and substitutes are often misconstrued to mean that racism is incompatible with humanism, yet racial categories and hierarchies are situated within the human race and regarded as being so (p. 59). The instrumentalization 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 perceptions 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 strategy 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 immigrants 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, assimilating acceptance […] and aggressive, even violent denial and restriction’ (Goldberg, 2006). The two economies unify the two halves of the incident that ordinarily are perceived as historical contradictions. The instrumentalization of refugees also helps contain 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 are 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 ‘network of affective stereotypes’ (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991: 20) conceals the heterogeneity 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 projection, 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 obsessional 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 representation 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 values (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 hierarchies 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.

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Brutal Kindness

We welcome you in our nation

Our borders open only to a few

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 us

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