On the Islamic Question: Multicultural Nationalism and the War on Terror

Abstract

There can be little disputing the proposition that the War on Terror has been the most important force shaping the global politics of race in the twenty-first century. The escalation of military violence in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on America in September 2001 gave voice, coherence and justification to a brand of racial politics consonant with the idea of a spectacular, religiously inflected battle between good and evil. Despite its high drama, the War on Terror was from the very start not the most concrete of undertakings, and it was in part its nebulous character — as a conflict without definite objectives or certain enemies — that meant that it readily lent itself to structuring and shaping a variety of discourses formed with and through the politics of race. Though bearing the mark of the American neoconservative project, these discourses were in themselves irreducible to its designs, and the War was in truth often only a convenient cipher that held together a broader ranging and more historically durable set of racial practices, some of which — to do with security and immigration regimes, social control and ‘cohesion’, narratives of national belonging and moral superiority — I have explored in the preceding chapters of this book. These various phenomena are thus not confined to Britain and America as the major partners in the ‘coalition of the willing’, and can, in spite of important differences, be shown to have patterned a remarkably consistent racial politics more generally operative in the West.