Arts & Sciences

To assert that the era of the nation-state is at an end and that globalization proceeds relentlessly across the face of the earth is now common. Yet scholars and political leaders increasingly note the vitality of subnational identity initiatives of many sorts: race/ethnic movements1, regional movements, and indigenous rights, environmental, gender and other mobilizations. Noting the phenomena does not explain them.

Coming to terms with the European manifestations of these processes is a challenge for "Europeanists." European studies, a multidisciplinary field, ranges across public policy through social structural analysis, to history, culture, and the fine arts. No one scholar is competent in all these fields and so European studies is necessarily a collaborative endeavor. Since identity politics, too, is a phenomenon far too complex to yield meaning to the theories and methods of a single discipline, multidisciplinary collaboration is essential to gain intellectual scope. I will give an example of one such multidisciplinary use of European studies from my own work and experiences.

My central claim is that knowing about European processes of identity politics opens up a number of important lines of inquiry about the United States.

It is hardly news to note that the United States approach to cultural difference is fundamentally "racial".2 The U.S. builds affirmative-action programs on the insistence that people classify themselves genealogically (even if the U.S. Census does mix some geographic and cultural criteria with racial ones). The languages of blood, the "one drop rule," and blood "fractions" are found everywhere in our country. Regardless of where people live, a key to their fundamental identity is thought to be their race. If you are black, you are black in Tacoma, Menlo Park, Greenwich, Durham, Miami, and Topeka. It does not matter where you are; you are what you "are." Just to fill out the race/ethnic information on a U.S. Census form requires a person to have become quite adept at the race/ethnic system of classification in the United States.

Even opponents of this divisive scheme of racial classification use the language of race to oppose it. A significant group is trying to have a new census category created-the "mixed race" box. Obviously, the term "mixed race" shows how strong the racial overtones of census categories are3.

Originating in justifications of slavery and immigration quotas, the race/ethnic classificatory system we use in our census and in our affirmative-action programs institutionalizes naturalistic notions of race/ethnicity in the structure of government and public policy for the ostensible purpose of redressing historical injustices. We are so engaged in a racial discourse that we use race/ethnic classifications to redress the ills created by race/ethnic prejudice.

The European approach to cultural difference has some similar elements but overall is quite different. Europe has a long history of racism and European societies engage in ongoing acts of racial oppression and exclusion. Many of these ideas are patently genealogical, as in the case of the oppression of the Jews or the notion that there are "blood" Germans who, so the story goes, by historical accident, were forced to live for generations outside Germany but who have the right to return to Germany as citizens4, or the widespread idea in Europe that the Gypsies are an inferior, criminal race.

Despite this, unlike the United States, European views about cultural difference rest much more heavily on geographical criteria. Where you are from and who you are culturally is very closely linked in European thinking. By and large, being from some place is taken to be a defining characteristic of a person, even though race and religion play a role. If anything, this European geographical emphasis, though at least a Hapsburg legacy, has been increasing in recent decades. Consider the hard edges of regional identities like the Basques, the Irish, the Corsicans, the Bretons, and so on.

Over the past 25 years, the West European social democracies have stressed the notion of subnational regional identities, partly because important structural policies of the European Union regionalize and "geographize" many dimensions of international politics. Overall, European Union policy has served to reinforce regional politics internal to the many states. For example, not only were home-rule statutes a condition for the Spanish Basques' and the Catalans' participation in the new Spanish Constitution in the 1970s, but these home-rule regions now also pursue active regionalist agendas in part by bypassing the Spanish national apparatus and dealing directly with the European Union on a variety of issues.

Thus nationally and within the European Union, the recognition of regional cultural differences has become a central instrument of political and economic management. The redress of historical injustice through home-rule statutes and redistribution of resources to regional groups, within individual nation-states, within the European Union, and throughout the rest of Europe are now common processes. The geographical dimension of politics has become evermore prominent and, with it, regionalist cultural movements as well.

Why do these differences about difference matter?

A comparison of Europe and the United States on the issues of identity politics yields some interesting reflections. This comparison makes it evident that, far from obeying simple universal laws, race/ethnic differences and their expression are highly responsive to their historical and institutional contexts in different parts of the world. Put another way, there is more than one way to deal with race/ethnic differences; policy choices are policy choices, not mere responses to laws of nature. These choices should be understood historically and justified ethically without recourse to the argument that it is just "human nature" to do things a particular way.

Our own historical experience in the United States shows us that racializing difference produces reified boundaries between race/ethnic groups. The majority sets a rhetoric that forces minorities to define themselves homogeneously as minority groups in return for recognition and resources. Class-based claims for social justice are barely audible in the United States, but race-based claims are clearly heard. In Spain, where class-based political ideologies have long had considerable strength, these class-based claims are increasingly undermined by regionalist initiatives that claim that regional ethnic prejudice rather than the maldistribution of wealth and opportunities is the major social evil to overcome.

The racialization of difference makes it appear that the social injustices of the United States will be resolved by white-to-other race/ethnic group redistributions of resources and opportunities, obscuring the fact that the majority of the poor in the United States are "white" and that these policies, in effect, pit poor "whites" and poor "minority" members against each other in claims for justice. While minorities are served to a degree by this, the "poor" as a whole are not. We know from recent economic statistics that, for the first time in our history, the overall distance between rich and poor has been increasing dramatically since the era of Ronald Reagan.

In Europe, geographizing difference produces hardened boundaries between race/ethnic groups and a politics of territorial inclusion and exclusion, e.g., ethnic home rule and ethnic cleansing. While the European social democracies5 are considerably less brutal in their treatment of poor citizens and immigrants than is the United States, because they believe in providing health care and retirement insurance to nearly everyone, geographizing difference means that many significant claims for the redistribution of resources toward disadvantaged groups must be made in geographical terms if they are to be heard in the present political system.

Thus, if we compare the United States and Europe, we note that both regimes attempt to manage and channel cultural differences and the resource claims that attach to difference into highly structured systems, domesticating the divisiveness that such claims threaten while also trying to redistribute as few resources from the rich to the poor as possible and keeping the cultural scene relatively quiet. Yet these systems are quite different in history and logic and fit into larger social configurations that are quite dissimilar.

What is more broadly interesting about this is that both trajectories, though seemingly so dissimilar, lead to the same neo-liberal outcome. In both the U.S. and Europe, class-based claims to society's resources are increasingly muted in favor of race/ethnic claims that both reduce class and general social solidarity and require the redistribution of a much smaller portion of society's resources from the rich to the poor than would be necessary in a society committed to health and welfare for all.

Davydd J. Greenwood is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Anthropology and Corresponding Member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. A specialist on Spain, he has been a member of the faculty since 1970. He works in the fields of action research in industry and community development and the study of ethnic identity and conflict. I adopt this term from Dvora Yanow's contribution to Honorio Velasco M., Jesus Prieto de Pedro, Carol Greenhouse, and Davydd Greenwood, eds. La democracia y la diferencia: cultura, poder y representaci-n en los Estados Unidos y en Espa-a (Madrid, Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de Educaci-n a Distancia, 1998). Rejecting the biological definability of race, she prefers, and I agree, to treat race and ethnicity as a political phenomenon as part of the same class of concepts. Or perhaps ̉naturalisticÓ in the sense that people in the U.S. generally assume the existence of racial and ethnic categories that bear some relation to the biology of the populations involved. The "mixed race" movement is the subject of a dissertation in progress by Kim Williams of the Department of Government at Cornell. See Stefan Senders, "Mimetic Identifications: Ethnic German Repatriation in Post-Cold War Berlin," unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University, 1999. To homogenize the European states this way is probably unwise. The Scandinavian countries have more ambitious social democratic agendas than do other European states, though Scandinavia also has to contend with much less cultural diversity as well. Still, when compared with the United States, the West European democracies and the Scandinavian ones all are so much more committed to not allowing members of society fall into poverty, illness, and starvation that it is tempting to contrast them all with us.