The time is right to discuss the language we use to describe injustices
analysis
Laura Stovel
The United States government announced this month that it will boycott the upcoming United Nations Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance if discussions equating Zionism and racism are held.
That stance is unfortunate. Such discussions could provide an important opportunity to revisit the language commonly used to describe a variety of ethnically or religiously based chauvinisms. The debate is long overdue.
The term “racism” has been used so broadly that it has been rendered almost meaningless. Racism, as a concept, arose from the colonial experience, the Holocaust, enslavement of Africans in the Americas and European biological theories aimed at justifying such actions. However, the term is now applied not only to the xenophobia and prejudice that exists in all societies, but also to Zionism and other forms of ethnic and religious nationalisms.
The fit is uncomfortable. Other concepts better represent the chauvinisms and ideologies that are now called “racism”.
In the 1990s journalists commonly described “ethnic cleansing” and mass killings in Croatia, Bosnia and Rwanda as “racism”. The term might, arguably, fit Rwanda, where Interahamwe organisers and propagandists subscribed to an ideology of racial difference between Hutus, Tutsis and Twa that dates back to colonial times. But ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was informed by an ideology of ethnic or religious nationalism. Both ideologies, racism and ethnic/religious nationalism, may be equally brutal in their outcomes but they are fundamentally different.
Racism is an inherently chauvinistic ideology that holds that one group, often visibly distinct from the dominant group, is inherently inferior. It is used either to exploit people for labour or to deprive them of rights, including political and land rights. While racism exists in Bosnia especially towards the Roma, or “gypsies” antagonism between Serbs, Croats and Muslims cannot be described in this way.
Ethnic or religious nationalism, on the other hand, claims that people’s main identity is ethnic or religious and often suggests that state boundaries should reflect such groupings.
Once in power, nationalists often argue that state governments need only represent their own people and culture. This view of mutual exclusivity is not necessarily chauvinistic but it is always problematic. Where people have long intermingled, where ethnically or religiously defined states have been created on others’ land, and where minorities exist within states, ethnic or religious nationalism inevitably deprives some people of political and institutional representation.
Ethnic or religious nationalisms, while always problematic, are not always bad. For historically oppressed peoples such as the First Nations (or North American Indians) in Canada, the Roma in Europe, Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East, a nationalist movement can be important for uniting people, protecting cultures and gaining recognition, security and self-determination for people who are not well represented by the states they live in. But although such nationalism may be a legitimate defence against a dominant or oppressive government or society, when it targets economically and politically weaker groups it is chauvinistic.
Usually, ethnic or religious nationalisms are chauvinistic. As with racism, an “enemy” group is regarded as inferior or less deserving of equal rights.
When those chauvinistic beliefs are acted on, the outcomes can be identical to racialist discrimination and violence. This was clearly the case in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia; Jewish religious nationalism has also taken this form in Israel.
This brings me to “enemy thinking”: an obsession with, and dehumanising of, groups seen as the enemy. After all the violence and heartbreak in the region, enemy thinking by Palestinians and Israelis is understandable. But this virulent chauvinism, this inability to empathise with “enemy” suffering, remains a stubborn obstacle to peace.
Zionism is not racism. It is an understandable nationalist response to a tremendous need for security by Jews worldwide. However, when religious nationalism denies the rights of vulnerable people to land, livelihoods, security and political representation, it is chauvinistic. And ethnic or religious chauvinism is as serious in its implications as racism.
What is needed now is not a censoring of debate, as the US government’s threatened boycott implies. Rather, the time is ripe to discuss critically the lang-uage and concepts we’re using to describe injustices of all types. We need a sophisticated language that doesn’t impose false hierarchies of severity or ill-fitting parallels. Such charges and denials may be gratifying, but they detract from the real human tragedies that need to be addressed.
Laura Stovel, a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, conducted research on post-war peace-building in Bosnia