The State of Race

N. Kapoor, V. Kalra, J. Rhodes, N. Kapoor, V. Kalra, J. Rhodes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230367517
• eBook ISBN: 9781137313089
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyses the nature of the contemporary racial state, exploring issues such as the nature of postraciality, racial neoliberalism, the state of multiculturalism and whiteness, alongside the functioning of state institutions and policy concerning the military, education, community surveillance, asylum and extradition.

Part II

6

Can You Have Muslim Soldiers? Diversity as a Martial Value

Vron Ware

When people raise the subject of racism with me and ask whether it is a matter of political correctness, I remind them that the most glorious hours of the British armed forces were spent when they stood alone against the most poisonous regime ever to emanate from the European continent. The poison at the heart of that regime was racism. There is no place for racism in the ethos of the British armed forces.¹

(John Reid, Minister for the Armed Forces 1997)

Nationalism and Patriotism are values that are totally compatible with Islam and Islamic teachings. Actually they not only compatible but are actually encouraged and seen as commendable traits. Therefore there a famous Islamic saying in Arabic “Hubbul watan minal eeman” – the love of your nation is part of your faith.

(Imam Asim Hafiz, Muslim chaplain to HM Armed Forces 2010)

Diversity increases operational effectiveness.

(Slogan on RAF diary 2012)

The British Army website is a movable feast. Like many corporate employers, the organisation constantly updates the online information and images so as to entice young men and women with the prospect of an exciting, fulfilling career. In February 2012, a page could be found in the section on joining the army, providing answers to frequently asked questions. ‘Army life has a lot of similarities to civilian life,’ it stated, ‘but there are times when it makes very different demands of the people who live it.’² A list of 12 questions could be found below, formatted in ‘accordion’ style so that the answers only appeared when the viewer clicked on the corresponding arrow. Thus it was possible to read them not just as a list but also an index of public ignorance surrounding the nature of military work.

The questions ranged from what soldiers ate and where they lived to whether they could go home or were allowed to leave the army. They also included inquiries about different types of food, pensions, injuries, wages and contact with friends and family. In the middle of the list, however, a more incongruous example leapt out: can you have Muslim soldiers? This prompted the compact reply:

The Army has soldiers from all faiths and communities. There are Muslim soldiers as well as Jewish soldiers, Hindu soldiers and others from Britain and Commonwealth countries. The only thing that matters is that soldiers are prepared to work for each other and towards a common goal.

This brief response is notable for the fluency with which it conveys the wide diversity of the workforce while simultaneously stressing the particular demands of soldiering. The only thing that matters is that people are prepared to work for each other, it declared.

There are good reasons to doubt that this was a routine question faced by recruiters talking to young British Muslims eager to sign up, and it is clear that its presence in this more humdrum list requires an alternative explanation. For one thing, it provided an opportunity to articulate the army’s embrace of diversity, speaking directly to young Asian applicants from Muslim or Hindu backgrounds. Not only could you have Muslim soldiers, we are told, but they also worked happily alongside soldiers of other faiths. This assertion, along with the supporting information that halal food was provided where possible, indicated that the army had embraced modern forms of diversity management in line with the rest of Britain’s public institutions. The extent of this integrated, cohesive work environment even hinted that military institutions might provide a space for minorities, including Muslims, to negotiate their identities as fully qualified national subjects, premised on their readiness to fight and die for their country.

The mention of soldiers from Commonwealth countries reflected the fact that non-British applicants were eligible to apply, although this was not addressed to them. But more troubling was the question itself: can you have Muslim soldiers? Asking why ‘Muslim soldiers’ might not be possible, permissible, feasible even, is a good place to start to reflect on the ways that war and racism are connected in twenty-first-century Britain. The uncertainty about whether British Muslim citizens are either entitled or prepared to perform military service articulates a ‘common-sense’ viewpoint that multiculturalism has become inseparable from national security. When the nation’s security is perceived to be under threat, either from inside or from outside the country, the appeal to national character, patriotism, and ethno-racial familiarity are asserted more forcefully (Goldberg 2009, p.55). Soldiers are commonly associated with patriotism, service to Queen and Country, and a heroic readiness to sacrifice their lives. The category of ‘Muslims’ is identified with the very causes of global insurgency, not least the dubious loyalties that lie beyond the borders of the national state (Qureshi and Zeitlyn 2013).

Against this background, the grounds for doubting the existence of the British Muslim soldier appear more solid. Yet the UK armed forces are seldom factored into political debates about citizenship, multiculturalism and immigration. They are regarded as operating on a different terrain, separate from the rest of the public sector to which they nominally belong, and their employment policies obscured behind the carefully managed screen of military public relations. It has long been accepted that national military institutions play a significant role in representing countries in the global arena, including the combat zone, but their role in shaping social structures and values in domestic spheres is rarely acknowledged outside the confines of specialist military sociology (Krebs 2004, p.89). In some periods the question of who joins the army is relatively dormant as a public concern. But studied over time, military recruitment strategies can be seen to play an important role in shaping the definition of the political community. Approaching military service through the framework of the state-funded public sector offers insights into concepts of citizenship and national belonging because it raises in acute form the question of what the country owes those who volunteer to join the armed forces (Ware 2010a). This is because, at certain moments, the act of volunteering to be a soldier is thought to reach into the heart of what it means to be a citizen and to ‘serve’ the country. And when greater attention is paid to the conditions of military service and the personal costs borne by the ‘ordinary’ women and men involved, the presence (or absence) of ethnic, cultural, sexual and religious minorities comes into view as an index of inclusion (or exclusion) in the wider society.

Reviewing the ‘diversification’ of the UK armed forces over the last decade, this chapter will argue that the policies and practices introduced to manage a multicultural workforce have themselves been militarised. That is, the various strategies associated with equality and diversity have not only been absorbed into a military setting, they have also been associated with the core values adopted by the military as their organisational ethos. As it turns out, not only can you have Muslim soldiers who are exemplary patriotic citizens, but, along with other minorities, they can also provide tools for the emerging defence, development and diplomacy nexus that shapes US-led foreign policy (Finney 2010). Accepting the potent meanings of soldiering as particularly symbolic work demands a much more rigorous analysis of the roles that the military institutions play, not just in defining the bounds of the nation, but also in arbitrating the terms of belonging as well (Cowen 2008).

Political communities

Military organisations, including veterans’ charities, provide substance to the national apparatus of Britishness, whether through the pomp and pageantry of royal occasions or the annual ceremonies of remembrance which give voice to the full expression of national identity reiterated in a timeless language of war and sacrifice. Assumptions about how the military relates to civilian society are formed by a range of factors: historical events, traditional practices, political settlements, legal agreements, media representation and personal experience. They also depend to a large extent on what citizens think about the wars that national armies are sent off to fight. As a consequence, recruitment into the armed forces is a supremely social issue as well as an intensely political one, and the line between military and civilian spheres exists as an unpredictable and unstable fissure. For those researching the politics of citizenship, belonging, and national identity, scrutinizing military employment policies and strategies when the country is at war becomes an important way of investigating the limits of the nation – both as an idea and in policy terms as well.

Recent events have demonstrated how military service in the cause of defending Britain’s interests in the past remains an important qualification for enacting modern claims to citizenship and defining the bounds of the political, national and postcolonial community (Paul 1998). This issue was exemplified by the media furore over the plight of elderly Nepalese ex-servicemen, many of whom had fought alongside the British Army in South East Asia in the 1960s. In 2008–9, the Campaign for Gurkha Justice, led by actor Joanna Lumley, pressurised the government to permit those who had served for a minimum of four years to live in the UK with full access to public funds. The Gurkha soldiers’ record of fierce loyalty to the British Crown, demonstrated by countless deaths in both 1914–18 and in 1939–45, provided the basis of public support for their right to social welfare in the UK. It was an important campaign, not least because the strength of public support signalled the resilience of a powerful idea about what it meant to be a soldier in the service of the nation, regardless of nationality or ethnic origin (Ware 2010, p. 321).

While the continuing policy of employing Gurkha soldiers drew attention to Britain’s historic recruiting practices, these was little comment at the time that the armed forces contained hundreds of other migrant personnel, particularly in the army. In 1998 the New Labour government relaxed the residency rules for Commonwealth citizens in response to severe manpower shortages. Individual regiments were recruited directly from countries such as Fiji and Jamaica to deploy in Northern Ireland, Kosovo and Sierra Leone, but by 2002 the army had begun to send ‘overseas pre-selection teams’ (OPTs) to process applicants so that they could travel directly to the UK and begin training immediately. These expeditions were carried out at intervals until the summer of 2008 when the financial crash began to alter patterns of retention and recruitment in the UK (Taylor 2009).

The annual report on UK Defence Statistics issued in April 2011 showed that 92.2 per cent of personnel in the army recorded British nationality, leaving 7.8 per cent (7600 soldiers) who were not UK citizens.³ Of these, 7.3 per cent were from either the Republic of Ireland or from Commonwealth countries, while 0.5 per cent (460 soldiers) were Nepali citizens who had transferred from the Brigade of Gurkhas. Breaking down these figures even further reveals that there were soldiers from 33 Commonwealth countries who were serving in the British Army.⁴ Over 2000 were from Fiji, 800 from Ghana, 790 from South Africa and 440 from Jamaica. Although Zimbabwe and Fiji had been suspended from the Commonwealth, their citizens were still eligible under the British Nationality Act 1981.

The employment of migrant-soldiers with strong postcolonial ties to Britain challenges the ‘common-sense’ racism and nationalism that delineates the boundaries of our political community by colour and concepts of indigeneity. Although the majority of these soldiers, some of whom are also designated as white, might otherwise be cast as ineligible skilled and unskilled migrants from outside the EU, they are not automatically rewarded with citizenship as a condition of employment in the armed forces. Nor is their path to citizenship, should they wish to apply, significantly expedited by their readiness to ‘serve’.

The inclusion of so many Commonwealth citizens has been fortuitous because it has allowed military institutions – particularly the British Army – to prove their commitment to successive diversity and equality policies, despite initial resistance on the grounds that HR policies devised for the civilian world did not apply (Dandeker 1994, p. 649). Anthony Forster has argued convincingly that military leaders fought a losing battle to control a professional space that remained outside legal interventions and impervious to societal pressure (Forster 2006). Collating the interventions and initiatives that took place in the late 1990s brings into view the convergence of legal, administrative, political and constitutional motors of reform that challenged the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD’s) claim to be an exceptional form of employer.

Corporate diversity

In 2011, the MoD issued a revised policy statement on diversity that was notable for the manner in which it moved away from the legalistic discourse of racial discrimination that had previously characterised its approach. ‘Equality and diversity is not a policy we pursue just because the legislation requires us to,’ it announced. ‘We pursue the policy simply because it is morally right and because it makes excellent business sense.’ Referring to the importance of recruiting civil and military employees across the breadth of society, it continued, ‘We encourage people throughout society to join us, and remain with us, to make their distinctive contributions and achieve their full potential.’ To do this effectively, the policy made clear that the ministry would not tolerate ‘any form of intimidation, humiliation, harassment, bullying or abuse’.⁵

Over a decade earlier, the British Army issued a set of recruitment posters based on Alfred Leese’s well-known ‘Your Country Needs You’ image of Lord Kitchener from the First World War. In one of these, Kitchener’s face had been replaced by that of Ghanaian-born Captain Fedelix Datson of the Royal Artillery.⁶ ‘Britain is a multi-racial country,’ the poster declared in small print at the bottom of the picture. ‘It needs a multi-racial Army.’ The word ‘need’ in this context illustrated the somewhat crude agenda set by a corporate version of multiculturalism, defined by Stuart Hall as an attempt ‘to “manage” minority cultural differences in the interests of the centre’ (Hesse 2000, p. 210). This process was driven in part by the climate of reform ushered in by the Macpherson Report, published in early 1999, and the Race Relations (Amendment) Act which followed in 2000, extending the definition of ‘public authorities’ to cover the police, and also, for the first time, the prison service and the armed forces. The new bill also gave the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) further powers to promote ‘race equality’, whether by issuing tighter codes of practice or by imposing specific duties on public bodies.

The evident disparity between this vocabulary of equal opportunities and ‘racial groups’ an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The State of Race
• Part  I
• Part  II
• Index