Multiculturalism, moralism, and the politics of a “new” nationalism
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3513
Commento di Jonathan Friedman, Politicamente corretto. Il conformismo morale come regime, a cura di Piero Zanini, traduzione di Francesca Nicola e Piero Zanini, Milano, Meltemi, 2018, pp. 348.
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George Baca
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Multiculturalism, moralism, and the politics of a “new” nationalism
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Book forum: Jonathan Friedman – Politicamente corretto
2018-12-31
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2018-12-31
2018-12-31
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George Baca
2018/12/31
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3513
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Multiculturalism, moralism, and the politics of a “new” nationalism
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                                         2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 229-234




                                                                        BOOK FORUM

Multiculturalism, moralism, and the politics of a
“new” nationalism
George BACA
Dong-A University


Comment on JONATHAN FRIEDMAN, Politicamente corretto. Il conformismo morale come
regime, edited by Piero Zanini, translation by Francesca Nicola and Piero Zanini,
Milano, Meltemi, 2018, pp. 348.



   Jonathan Friedman has written powerfully about the political and eco-
nomic transformation of Euro-American societies since the 1970s (Friedman
1995; Friedman and Friedman 2008)1. Friedman rejects the view that finance
capital represents a particular stage of capitalism. Instead, he sees present-
day decentralizing of capital accumulation as the recurrent rise of finance
and withdrawal of capital from production. He is in the excellent company of
Fernand Braudel and Giovanni Arrighi – as well as John Maynard Keynes – in
underlining the conflict between long-term, fixed capital and the speculative
nature of finance capital (Braudel 1982; Arrighi 1994; Keynes 1936). As he-
gemonic centers of capitalist accumulation rise, so do the costs of doing
business, which encourage the export of capital and the increasing import-
ance of credit and finance to feebly, and fleetingly, step into the breach. The
powerful industrialized nations that settled World War II, and rebuilt the
global economy through the establishment of the Bretton Woods multilater-
al system, are presently experiencing economic decline, the unraveling of
social institutions, and the rise of political instability that has accompanied
growing disparities in wealth.
1




1. This study was supported by research funds from Dong-A University.


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © George Baca
Multiculturalism, moralism, and the politics of a “new” nationalism
2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 229-234.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3513
230                                                                GEORGE BACA


   The politics of multiculturalism has emerged during the same period
when European and North American financial and political leaders have
turned against Keynesian economic policies, especially capital controls, and
implemented policies that exported capital and simultaneously rolled back
social provisions of the welfare state (Baca 2006; Baca 2010). Befitting of
Friedman’s iconoclasm, Politicamente corretto. Il conformismo morale come
regime, highlights the moralistic nature of multicultural politics by taking
aim at Sweden, for many, the poster-child of the welfare state. Friedman
takes the reader beneath these positive images of Sweden to illustrate how
neoliberal economic policies encouraged mass immigration from the Third
World and readjustments in the welfare state. Moreover, he argues that a
«rising elite», directing these social changes in the organization of Swedish
society, have embraced multiculturalism. Furthermore, political leaders and
prominent opinion makers have fashioned a sense of political correctness to
shield questions of immigration from criticism. Those who dare to question
mass immigration risk being classified as racists or right-wing extremists.
   Friedman tends to present multicultural narratives that celebrate immig-
ration as if they reject nationalism and the nation-state. However, national-
ism, much like PC discourse, does not have a fixed content. Politicians and
citizens are continually revising and elaborating national myths and symbols
in relationship to social, political, and economic transformations. Many
writers, including Friedman, have been too quick to announce the decline of
the nation-state amid contemporary shifts from Keynesian macroeconomics
to neoliberal economic policies. Rather than a dissolving nation-state, I see
national politicians and financial leaders adapting the myths and symbols of
the nation to meet the challenges represented by the export of capital and
the retrenchment of the welfare state. In this process, multiculturalism –
and its discourse of tolerance – exerts immense ideological power in elabor-
ating nationalist myths of the liberal democratic state at a moment of in-
creasing economic inequality. Moreover, these frames create a sense of cre-
ates a sense of sympathy for elites who are trying to maintain social solidar-
ity in the face of anti-democratic threats – a theme being played in the
United States as corporate elites embrace multiculturalism, and ideals of
democracy, as they struggle with Donald Trump’s regime.
   Friedman’s reluctance to conceptualize multiculturalism in relationship
to nationalist politics stems partly from the unique impetus for this work.
During the late 1990s, many Swedish social commentators, scholars, and an-
thropological colleagues attacked his wife, anthropologist Kajsa Ekholm
Friedman, for being anti-immigrant and racist. The pain and duress that


2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 229-234
MULTICULTURALISM, MORALISM, AND THE POLITICS OF A “NEW” NATIONALISM                  231


Friedman experienced during this awful ordeal animate the book. Politica-
mente corretto reads like one part defense of his spouse and one part exten-
ded case method of Manchester School fame (see Gluckman 1940; Turner
1957). Friedman employs a version of the extended case method to examine
the twists and turns of the national controversy that enveloped his house-
hold for a decade. The controversy erupted in 1996 when Ekholm Friedman
agreed to give a talk to a political group called The People’s Will and Mass
Immigration (PWMI)2. Before she appeared, a major news show had already
reported that she was a leader of the PWMI. Sweden’s largest national news-
paper Dagens Nyheter expanded the sense that she had breached proper
norms of a multicultural society by falsely reporting that Ekholm Friedman
disparaged African immigrants for infiltrating the country with fake college
degrees. In an attempt to quell the drama, she wrote a commentary in Da-
gens Nyheter. She admitted it was a mistake to speak before the PWMI and
went on to clarify that she was not anti-immigrant. Instead, she came to un-
derstand, through her ongoing research, which was Guggenheim funded,
that «ethnification» and ethnic politics during periods of increasing unem-
ployment and economic decline represent a «serious problem».
   Friedman’s depiction of the social drama lacks necessary details. Max
Gluckman developed the extended case to focus analysis on the emergent
qualities of a social formation, to examine cultural politics beyond the «apt
illustration» and to bring the underlying issues of conflict under sharp ana-
lysis. Friedman arrays the data in ways that do not capture the emergent
qualities of Swedish political economy. After all, Friedman argues that PC
culture, and the sacred object of multiculturalism it seeks to protect, is part
of the processes of the decline of western hegemony and the nation-state.
However, he does not provide enough details of the various, and contradict-
ory arguments and how these changed throughout the social drama. He tells
us little about PWMI, dismissing them as an unthreatening group of elderly
people who were concerned about mass immigration in Sweden. More prob-
lematically, Friedman does not provide the full text of Ekholm Friedman’s
comments about immigration during the entire ordeal. Instead, he para-
phrases her main idea: the Swedish government has implemented immigra-
tion policies in ways that has furthered processes of «ethnification» in ways
that could threaten the Swedish welfare state. In other places, he tells us
that she argued that multiethnicity is a real problem and it has explosive po-
tential and must be taken seriously. Nevertheless, the primary question re-


2. Folkviljan och massinvandring.

                                       2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 229-234
232                                                                 GEORGE BACA


mains: what, and how, is multi-ethnicity potentially dangerous? In addition,
how did Ekholm Friedman’s perspectives on ethnic conflict, immigration,
and the decline of the nation-state develop throughout the social drama?
   Rather than engaging in constructive debate, anthropologists, including
graduate students from Lund University where both the Friedmans taught,
reacted bitterly to her words of redress. By questioning national immigration
policies, they associated her with the subversion of the multicultural social
order and its mores of tolerance. Most notably, four prominent Swedish an-
thropologists – Professors Gudrun Dahl, Ulf Hannerz, Kaj Århem, Karl Erik
Knutsson – wrote a joint letter to Dagens Nyheter denouncing Ekholm Fried-
man for not only being destructive regarding immigration but for also con-
fusing anthropological concepts of culture and ethnicity. For me, the most
telling aspect of this «anthropological» response was that it highlighted the
ways that multiculturalism works with, rather than against, nationalist polit-
ics. Hannerz et al., in a patriotic tone, declared that Sweden was «born as a
country in relation to enriching long distance contacts. » From this national-
ist mythology of long-distance contacts as an essential feature of the nation,
they credit immigrants with further contributing cultural imports, ideas, and
people that have «added to the wealth of the culture and tradition». Instead
of criticizing this dreadful use of anthropological knowledge to support a na-
tionalist politics, Friedman trivializes their claims as «cute, cozy, and con-
sumerist». There is nothing cute about the way that these anthropologists
used their authority to use multiculturalism to engage in politics, during a
moment of downturn, to create the image of a «new» and «enlightened» ver-
sion of the liberal nation-state (see Brown 2009; Povinelli 2002). Many years
ago, Talal Asad pointed out this nationalistic aspect of British multicultural-
ism by showing that the idea of «rich culture-and-tradition» of the nation is
already in place, as «an essence» which foreigners can contribute. This nar-
rative of the nation creates an affinity «between what they bring and what is
essentially there» (Asad 1993: 242).
   These relationships of power raise a problem in how Friedman uses the
term «rising elites». He draws this idea from previous criticisms of globaliza-
tion discourses of the late 1990s whereby authors like Arjun Appadurai de-
ployed the term globalization to invoke the sense of new and overwhelming
cultural forces (Appadurai 1996). Such narratives conjured a sense of rupture
whereby new and sweeping cultural forces have transcended borders and un-
dermined nation-states and sovereignty. Friedman countered by showing
that theories of globalization were elite representations, of a new cosmopol-
itan and transnational class, as opposed to analytic categories for the ex-


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MULTICULTURALISM, MORALISM, AND THE POLITICS OF A “NEW” NATIONALISM                  233


planation of these processes (Friedman 2002). However, the contemporary
elites in Sweden, with their embrace of multiculturalism, are not simply a
new and rising force. Indeed, many of these groups have profound connec-
tions to the interwar political establishment that embraced Eugenics, anti-
-Semitism, and fascism.
   After the War, Friedman points out, Swedish leaders began fashioning a
new image of the nation, following Ernst Renan's dictum «forgetfulness», or
perhaps «historical error» are essential to nation-building (Renan 1990
[1882]). Postwar political and economic leaders silenced this unsavory past
and promoted a new image as the «global good guy». Friedman jumps to the
conclusion that this new project was a shift from a «strongly nationalist to
anti-nationalist positions». Postwar politics changed, and Swedish leaders
revised the narratives and symbolism of the nation. Swedish nationalism
changed partly because of the disastrousness World Wars. Also, the US-led
Bretton Woods system integrated the major capitalist countries into a multi-
lateral system based on the ideals of cooperation. Moreover, the changes
continued and moved in a different direction after the 1970s. With the shift
away from the Keynesian political economy and the influx of Third World
immigrants, dominant political and economic interests in the West have
found multiculturalism a dominant discourse for revising of nationalism and
its models of state power. In this way, multicultural politics carries forward
the narrative of Sweden as a global good guy after the shift from Keynesian
economic policies.
   There is one important aspect that Politicamente Corretto does not fully
address: the ways that the politics of multiculturalism seeks to discipline and
structure the integration of immigrants into Europe, the US, and now, even
South Korea. The guiding theme of the political correctness of multicultural-
ism is the discourse of tolerance. Tolerance works as a mode of governance
that «iterates the normalcy of the powerful» at the same time it regulates the
presence of the Other both inside and outside the liberal democratic nation-
state (Brown 2009). In Korea, for example, the state has developed multicul-
tural discourses and institutions through the master narrative of the nation
to culturalize politics by neutralizing inequality and the exploitation of for-
eign workers as an expression of cultural differences (Baca 2017). Much like
in Sweden, Korean political and economic leaders deploy the cultural idiom
of the nation to reconstitute immigration as the progressive development of
the state through the incorporation of new cultural values, which are to be
protected by new values of tolerance and acceptance. As Wendy Brown
points out, the ethics of tolerance legitimates the most illiberal actions of
the state by employing a term consummately associated with liberalism

                                       2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 229-234
234                                                                          GEORGE BACA


(Brown 2009). Friedman, by focusing primarily on the way the policies of im-
migration have threatened Swedish workers, he does not delve into the way
multiculturalism exploits Third World immigrants. Unfortunately, this
caveat dovetails with the way conservative criticisms of multiculturalism up-
hold the belief that multiculturalism promotes a relativistic tolerance and
that it provides immigrant with rights without proper duties.

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