Racism in Europe

1870-2000

Neil MacMaster, Jeremy Black

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780333711200
• eBook ISBN: 9781350317390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études ethniques

The study of modern racism has tended to treat anti-Semitism and anti-black racism as separate and unconnected phenomena. This innovative study argues that a full understanding of the origins and development of racism in Europe after 1870 needs to examine the structure and interrelationships between the two dominant forms of prejudice. Contrary to expectation. anti-black racism was not confined to the colonial maritime nations of western Europe, but pepetrated even the rural societies of central and eastern Europe. Likewise, anti-Semitism could flourish even in the almost total absence of Jews. MacMaster explores the conditions under which modern political movements, faced with the crisis of modernity, began to draw upon and mobilise the negative stereotypes that, through the development of the mass media, had become almost universal features of popular culture. By weaving together the changing spatial and temporal dimensions of anti-Semitic and anti-black prejudice the study provides a fresh and more global framework for understanding modern racism.

PART 1

1870–1914

The age of the ‘New Imperialism’ was to see the emergence of a modern racism that emphasized the ineradicable biological and cultural difference between Europeans and external colonial ‘Others’, as well as the simultaneous and deepening divide between Europeans and internal groups that were seen as ‘alien’, particularly the Jews. The forms of scientific and popular racism that took root during this period established all the essential features of the racism that assumed a wider and more threatening political form during the inter-war period. Part 1 ends on the eve of the First World War since this marked a crucial watershed, the collapse of the German, Russian and Austrian Empires, revolutionary turmoil, and conditions for the growth of fascist and right-wing nationalistic movements. Chapter 2 examines the impact of colonial and anti-black propaganda during the age of high Imperialism, and how this assumed a widespread form within the boundaries of Europe in spite of the small black presence. Chapter 3 looks at the growth of anti-Semitism, which provided beyond any question the dominant form of political racism throughout the period 1870–1945. However, before examining these two predominant forms of racism, Chapter 1 investigates the nature of white ‘self-referential’ racism which assumed a particularly acute expression between 1870 and 1914 through Social Darwinism, eugenics and ideas of national hygiene and efficiency. White fin-de-siècle Europe experienced a profound sense of anxiety about its own racial substance, and a fear of physical degeneration, that it tried to counter through state intervention and bio-power.

1

THE WHITE RACE: DEGENERATION AND EUGENICS

One of the paradoxes of European racism is that its language seems to be centred on, or engrossed with, the negative characteristics of the Other, blacks (libidinous, dirty, lazy … ) or Jews (grasping, parasitical, cunning … ), whereas the reverse side of the coin, the construction of European ‘whiteness’, is strangely absent. The overwhelming concern with the moral and physical features of the Other means that the European is occluded; within most texts white identity and its essential characteristics are implicit, taken for granted, and thus become the unspoken norm, the measuring stick, from which all other racial groups deviate. The invisibility of whiteness, its unstated nature, derives from the fact that in Western culture, through language and representation, whites have an almost universal and central role as the standard of biological and aesthetic excellence. Few Christians take conscious note, let alone realize the significance, of the fact that the predominant Western image of Jesus Christ, a Jewish Palestinian, is of a blue-eyed Aryan, with long, fair tresses. It is only in recent years that scholars have begun to explore more systematically the historical and psychological processes through which ‘white’ identity has been constructed. This ‘self-reflection’ by white Europeans is central to an understanding of how racism has historically functioned: as Richard Dyer comments: ‘As long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people.’¹

Racist ideologies are invariably relational and work through binary oppositions between ‘Us’, the superior group that engages in the process of racialization, and ‘Them’, the inferior target group. Social psychology suggests that the ‘Other’ is crucial to the process by which boundaries or frontiers of identity are constructed: ‘You know who you are, only by knowing who you are not.’² A key feature of racial categorizations of the Other is that they invariably represent a projection and a negative inversion of the central moral, aesthetic and cultural values of the dominant group. As was seen in the Introduction, when Europeans described blacks as inherently lazy, what they meant implicitly was that white Europeans were naturally dynamic, busy and enterprising. And likewise, if blacks were libidinous, dirty, diseased, ugly, thieving, cowardly, stupid and superstitious, then Europeans were sexually restrained and monogamous, clean and healthy, fair and beautiful in form, honest and brave, intelligent and moral. Europeans, through racializing the Other, simultaneously racialized themselves. Such rules of binary opposition are common to many types of group boundary definition, from family, tribe and village, to nationalism and ethnicity. Where modern racism differs from these other forms is that it naturalizes difference in absolute biological or cultural terms so that barriers between collectivities are rendered impermeable. The French racist theoretician Vacher de Lapouge typically formulated this by the claim that it was impossible for immigrants ever to become French: ‘The prince can no more make a Frenchman from a Greek or a Moroccan than he can bleach the skin of a Negro, make round the eyes of a Chinaman or change a woman into a man.’³

In this chapter we are concerned with self-referential racism, the processes by which Europeans designated themselves as a superior race, as opposed to hetero-referential racism and the negative stereotyping of inferior Others which, although part of the same process, will, for the purposes of analysis, be treated in later chapters. Self-referential racism is of particular interest during the period before the First World War since European society was haunted by the spectre of its own degeneration, while, at the same time, many felt that they had discovered the solution to physical decay in the first scientific methods for the eugenic breeding of a superior racial type. The European racial project had as much to do with technologies for the transformation of its own group biological substance, as it did with the segregation, exclusion or extermination of ‘inferior breeds’.

Race and Degeneration

Degeneration was an age-old theme in European thought, but in the past the idea of social decadence had been treated in moral and religious terms: for example, eighteenth-century thinkers portrayed the decline and fall of ancient Rome, as well as the imminent fall of modern European civilization, in terms of luxury, excess, a softening of the will and a physical exhaustion that was a consequence of moral turpitude. In the second half of the nineteenth century the concept of degeneration moved to centre stage, became an all-pervasive concern, and found a new authoritative expression through scientific theories of evolution, morbidity and psycho-physical abnormality.

The language of degeneration was widely deployed in relation to ‘inferior’ races, and in particular to the idea that interbreeding between races, or ‘miscegenation’, inevitably led to an irreversible deterioration in the physical and intellectual qualities of hybrid groups. A radical opposition to ‘race-mixing’ had been a widespread feature of colonial and slave societies from the seventeenth century onwards: the French, for example, legislated against intermarriage in Guadeloupe in 1711 and in Louisiana in 1724, to prevent what one missionary called, ‘a criminal coupling of men and women of different species, whence comes a fruit which is one of Nature’s monsters’.⁴ Colonial racism of this type was eventually integrated into nineteenth-century ‘scientific’ racist systems, like the highly influential Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853–5) of Count Gobineau. Gobineau, who was to have a major impact on German racism after the turn of the century, elaborated a theory of history in terms of the inexorable decline of civilizations through racial mixing and the degradation and enervation of the Aryan, the most brilliant and superior type. However, within the borders of fin-de-siècle Europe, as opposed to colonial society, the central preoccupation was not with the dangers presented by misalliance with inferior races, largely absent from the Continent, so much as with the generalized biological deterioration of the white race itself.

The term ‘degeneration’ was used to refer to a whole range of social pathologies that threatened the biological substance of the European race(s), from alcoholism, tuberculosis and venereal disease, to lack of physical training, cretinism and sexual perversion. While the late nineteenth century was superficially an age of unprecedented optimism in the power of science and progress, among its writers and artists, from Ibsen and Zola to Gerhart Hauptmann, there were all the signs of a morbid and deepening pessimism, in which the metaphors of disease, madness and decay proliferated. As Max Nordau commented in his book Degeneration (1892): ‘We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic; of a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria.’⁵ The growing anxiety that Europe was confronted with a profound inner crisis, a process of biological decay, was to receive its most sophisticated analysis and resolution in Social Darwinism and the science of eugenics and ‘racial hygiene’. The drive towards the ‘rescue’ of the European race or of the national stock between c.1870 and c.1914 needs to be placed within the broader context of the Darwinian Revolution.

Social Darwinism

Darwin’s key work, On the Origin of Species (1859), had an enormous and rapid impact throughout Europe, from Russia to Portugal: translations appeared in all the major languages, for example, German and Dutch editions appeared in 1860, French (1862), Russian (1864), Italian (1864–5) and Spanish (1877). Darwin’s evolutionary theory was by no means the only one that determined social and political thought in the period after 1860. For example, for some decades the impact of Darwinism in France was quite weak since French scientific thought remained largely entrenched within the paradigm of neo-Lamarckian evolution, which maintained that acquired characteristics could be inherited. However, despite the many theoretical and often contradictory strands that went to make up late nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, Darwinism undoubtedly provided the paradigm of the age, the most influential and sophisticated explanation for the mutation of species. In The Origins Darwin studiously avoided applying his theory of natural selection to humans since, in an age when Christianity was still extremely influential, he wished to avoid controversy. However, the cat was out of the bag and, well before Darwin came to explore the implications of his theory for human evolution in The Descent of Man (1871), numerous scientists had eagerly seized upon his ideas and, in applying them to human societies, began to develop the general body of theory known as Social Darwinism. The basic premise of Social Darwinism was that natural selection had, over geological time, ensured that those organisms which were best adapted to the environment would survive and pass on their inherited advantages, while the weak and maladaptive would die and, in doing so, fail to reproduce. Social Darwinists believed that such processes of selection were at work within contemporary societies: it was in the long-term interests of the human species that competition and war should ensure the reproduction of the strongest and most intelligent individuals and the most biologically superior race-nations. The influential Social Darwinist Karl Pearson, for example, wrote that the scientific definition of a nation, ‘is that of an organized whole, kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the struggle for trade-routes and for the sources of raw material and of food supply.’⁶

Social Darwinism assumed the form of a ‘class-racism’, an expression of the mounting fear of the European bourgeoisie faced with the growth of huge and dangerous proletarian slums in the major cities, from London and Paris, to Vienna, Berlin and St Petersburg. The poor, pullulating in urban rookeries, provided a concentrated mass in which epidemics, crime, immorality and Socialism could breed, threatening to burst out and to swamp the civilized order in a wave of primitive barbarism, as it had in the Paris Commune of 1871. As George Sims said of the London poor:

It has now got into a condition in which it cannot be left. This mighty mob of famished, diseased and filthy helots is getting dangerous, physically, morally, politically dangerous. The barriers which have kept it back are rotten and giving way, and it may do the state a mischief if it be not looked to in time. Its fevers and its filth may spread to the homes of the wealthy; its lawless armies may sally forth and give us the taste of the lesson the mob has tried to teach now and again in Paris.⁷

The deep anxiety of the educated élites faced with the ‘rise of the masses’ and access to the vote, the spread of revolutionary political movements and trade unions, found expression in a racialization of the working class. Louis Chevalier has shown how the Parisian bourgeoisie increasingly deployed a language that described the classes dangereuses in racial terms, as primitive and instinctual beings who carried all the inherited stigmata of the savage – sexual potency, low intelligence, moral corruption, violence and raw animality.⁸ The French historian Taine, who studied medicine and psychiatry, deployed an evolutionary and medical language to plot the course of French history: with the Revolution of 1789, he wrote: ‘we see all of a sudden spring forth the barbarian, and still worse the primitive animal, the grinning, sanguinary baboon, who chuckles while he slays.’⁹ The Italian criminal anthropologist Lombroso, in line with an older tradition of phrenology, developed after 1870 a photographic system to record the primitive features of the criminal type who, like some evolutionary throwback, showed all the hereditary features of the savage. The criminal, he claimed, was:

an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek bones, prominent super-cilliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped ears found in the criminals, savages and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresponsible craving of evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.¹⁰

The idea that modern man might contain, buried within himself, dark instinctive forces that threatened to overwhelm the thin veneer of civilized behaviour also found expression in the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, as well as in literature, from Stephenson’s Jekyll and Hyde to the unspeakable horror faced by the adventurer Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Although space does not enable the full treatment which it deserves, it can be noted that the language of race was invariably also a language of gender, and of a science that presented women as biologically and morally inferior. As Nancy Stepan has shown, women, like primitives, were thought to be of a lower order, less evolved and similar to children in their intellectual and emotional development.¹¹ Women were also prone to regression, particularly when in a crowd, to descend into atavistic forms of savagery, blood-lust and even cannibalism. As with class, the naturalization of difference between male and female was used as an ideological barrier to the rise of feminism. If women constituted a separate ‘race’, and were locked into the inferior and hereditary characteristics of their group, there was no way that educational reform, or any other measures, could enable them to undertake the functions of the superior male. So entrenched and universal were sexist differentiations in European society and culture that the perceived absolute separation of male and female could also work in the opposite direction, to feminize inferior male races.

Returning to Social Darwinism and eugenics, a central idea of these movements was that the further modern societies developed, the more they created welfare systems that interfered with the laws of natural selection. For tens of thousands of years prehistoric man, and even more recent pre-industrial man, had progressed as a racial type in intelligence and physique through the harsh but necessary impact of disease, famine and tribal warfare that remorselessly weeded out sickly individuals or entire non-adaptive groups. As Ribot commented in his Heredity (1875), medical science and improved resources ‘makes more and more certain the future of children, by saving the lives of countless weak, deformed, or otherwise ill-constituted creatures that would surely have died in a savage race, or in our own country a century ago’.¹² Across Europe, Social Darwinists pointed to the same, underlying problem of the modern age: the immense growth of cities created the social problems associated with overcrowding in filthy, airless slums, a brutalized ‘residuum’ that sought to escape its miserable existence through alcoholism and sexual licence, and which sank ever deeper into physical and moral degeneration. However, this pale and wretched ‘race’, instead of dying out, was able to survive through the growing intervention of charitable organizations, and local and central government welfare. During the second half of the nineteenth century all European states engaged in welfare programmes that attempted to alleviate the conditions of the urban poor, from slum housing regulation, health inspection and sewerage disposal, to medical dispensaries, public hospitals and soup kitchens. The concern of the Social Darwinists was t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction: The Roots of Modern Racism
• Part 1: 1870–1914
• Part 2: 1914–1945
• Part 3: 1945–2000
• Conclusion: Black and Jew
• Notes
• A Short Guide to Further Reading
• Index