Racism’s targets shift as the dominant state form changes over time

Evidence

Writing before the post-2008 crises that have engulfed Europe, Bunzl proposed that ‘the Jewish Question’ that structured modern antisemitism belonged to the age of the nation-state, since Jews were its constitutive outsider. Yet in the age of a supra-national Europe, he argued, the nation’s ‘Jewish Question’ has been superseded by a pan-European ‘Muslim Question’. Such shifting configurations of statehood are, as several contributions to this book show, key to the changing nature of racism: we propose that the passage from empires to nation-states and the instability of nation-states in a period of intensified globalization are particularly important moments in history. However, as we will argue, it is inadequate to pair one racism with one configuration of the state form and another racism with a different political structure; the point is that both racisms change over time as the state form changes. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 71

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes arguments about nationalism and the construction of constitutive outsiders; also the figure-ground/liminality work on societal outsiders in earlier soundscape/silence reading. — connects to: Conviviality theory loses critical force when divorced from state racism and hierarchy. — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 5; State racism operates pragmatically rather than from coherent durable ideology.