Document Type
Journal Article
Abstract
The murder of the Dutch far-right political leader Pim Fortuyn on 7 May 2002, only a week before the election that took his party to second place in the national parliament, popularised a term that had previously been the preserve of the academy: culturalism.1 A self-confessed culturalist, the sociologist-turnedpolitician refused to identify with the more overtly racist policies of Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Jorg Haider in Austria. He argued instead that his opposition to non-Western (predominantly Muslim) immigration was based on cultural incompatibility. For Fortuyn, liberal Western values such as gender and sexual equality, individualism, and the separation of state and church could not co-exist with the "backward" cultural views espoused by the immigrants. Fortuyn's particular blend of liberal and reactionary ideas may have been unique, but the borderline between culturalism and racism is more blurred than he cared to acknowledge, and his arguments concerning cultural incompatibility are not fundamentally different from those of politicians he classified as racist. Versions of his culturalist (or neo-racist, as Etienne Balibar calls it) argument have echoed across Western Europe, Australia, and the West in general in recent years, destabilising the political balance of the postwar period and leading to a noticeable shift to the right. Indeed, as Stuart Hall has recently argued, far from being mutually exclusive, multiculturalism and racism seem to be symbiotically linked: it is worth identifying with one of the most difficult things to comprehend nowadays about this society—the absolute coincidence of multiculturalism and racism. Far from being the opposite ends of a pole so that one can trade the rise of one against the decline of the other, it seems to be absolutely dead central to society that both multiculturalism and racism are increasing at one and the same time (Hall and Maharaj 2001, 48-49).
Publication Details
Ommundsen, W. 2003, 'Tough ghosts: Modes of cultural belonging in diaspora', Asian Studies Review, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 181-204.