UNLIKE NUMBERS, words gather new meanings. They grow and mutate, so much so that poor Noah Webster and his lot must string lists of definitions to a sole entry. What happens when words transform or when they suddenly travel and pop up amid new signs and symbols? Then our verbal calculations may quietly go awry. No one may notice that things add up differently, but they do. The story of xenophobia has been of a word that has gone through a series of alterations and migrations. A late-nineteenth-century neologism that was brought forth in French and English became a tool, a map, a mirror, an atmosphere of opinion, and finally a curse.
Curses, of course, matter. In 1934, one of the Frankfurt School’s exiles, Norbert Elias, published The Civilizing Process, in which he examined some ways in which cultural adaptations occurred. Social disruptions led to shifting standards of behavior, he argued, so that what was once acceptable—like eating with your hands or spitting under your host’s dinner table—became dishonorable, disgusting, and shameful. After 1945, xenophobia came to represent such a taboo. What once was condoned or ignored now warranted a rebuke. How that prohibition related to the word’s past meanings became obscured. No matter. The Holocaust and the continued mixing of the world’s populations made it critical to forcefully reject the assumption that foreigners and strangers were enemies.
During the Cold War years, Western liberal democracies as well as socialist nations shared this revulsion. Soviets and Americans each took pride in their defeat of Fascism and Nazism. They each conceived of themselves as the Hitler slayers, the ones who ended the genocide of the Jews. As these Goliaths pointed their nuclear arsenals at each other, this much they shared. After millions of dead, the prayers for a new moral code, those entreaties that linked Bartolomé de Las Casas to Raphael Lemkin, seemed to have been answered. During the postwar years, xenophobia had become a curse. Its problems seemed to belong to a bygone era. It was hard to imagine that they would ever return.
BREXIT AND THE election of Donald Trump almost made no sense to me at first. They seemed to contradict assumptions I held for most of my adult life. During the 1980s, I came of age awash in the belief that a broad-based commitment to human rights was slowly but inexorably progressing. In college psychology class, we asked whether the James-Lange theory or misplaced associations or stereotyped ideas made for prejudice. Historians and sociologists examined how communal affiliations sequestered and distorted knowledge. Literary and semiotic studies analyzed the power of misrepresentation in everything from literary masterpieces to ads for the Marlboro Man. Many of us studied Freud, the Frankfurt School, Beauvoir and the second wave of feminists. My campus hummed with excitement thanks to illuminations and, somehow, sexy obfuscations emerging from deconstruction and the French invasion.
With the Holocaust hovering not far behind us, and American racism all around, these pursuits hardly seemed abstract; they translated into a concern with language and politically correct culture, which in my time was a rather timid call for self-restraint. Prohibitions were strong against the N-word, a few derogatory terms for Jews and women, not much more. Gay men and lesbians generally stayed in the closet, and other minorities, myself included, mostly kept quiet. When a New York society girl called my wife’s Nicaraguan friend a “spic,” that was supposedly good fun, though he got the better of the encounter when he replied, “and you are despicable.”
The long arc of history, I trusted, would bend toward justice. While passage of the Equal Rights Amendment failed, women became leaders at my medical school. We marched and South African apartheid fell. The Oslo Accords seemed to augur peace in the Middle East. The Iron Curtain came down. Closeted friends and colleagues stepped forth to claim their sexual identities.
In these struggles, xenophobia seemed of dwindling relevance. Across much of the political spectrum, commentators advertised their repulsion and rejection of racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism. Sometimes they added xenophobia, but it was only for good measure. The world had changed. Everyone had squeezed under two nuclear umbrellas, and in this bipolar conflict, dangerous political ideologies marked the enemy. In Chairman Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, repressive violence targeted dissident belief. In the United States, how did fear of foreigners apply to lingering McCarthyism or military deployments into Southeast Asia, Central America, and the Middle East? For everyone from George Kennan to Henry Kissinger, Marxist dominoes mattered more than ethnicity. The world faced tense Cold War dilemmas. Xenophobia did not seem to be one of them.
Besides, for believers in liberal democracy, that problem already had found its solution. Toleration was the cure, xenophobia the illness; they were the necessary virtue and perilous vice of expanding, pluralistic societies. Within private life, such egalitarianism was neither demanded nor expected; after all, people liked people who were like them. Nothing wrong there. However, before the law, within institutions, and more broadly in public discourse, toleration affirmed the self-evident equality of all political, legal, and moral subjects. This ethos was codified in 1948 by the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While many dismissed the document as utopian, Nelson Mandela considered it a noble bulwark against hatred. After its ratification, this declaration lay dormant until it was roused to life three decades later by American president Jimmy Carter. Its human rights credos have since spread, as part of what Michael Ignatieff called “moral globalization.”
In socialist and communist nations, xenophobia was also considered an anathema, and they too believed they had found a solution. Followers of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin argued that national, ethnic, and religious bigotry would disappear in a classless society, where equality was ensured and enforced by the state. Once the bourgeoisie were eliminated, workers of the world would brush off minor differences and unite as comrades. For nations under the sway of the Soviet Union or for intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, capitalist exploitation was the deep structure that led to outbreaks of xenophobia. Scapegoats would vanish when the true source of suffering did as well.
In either case, both superpowers agreed that hatred of strangers was a plague that must be prevented. A great lesson had been learned. Or so it seemed. Then, in 2016, we awoke to a shock. The ground had been moving underneath us without our knowing it. Xenophobia was again on everyone’s lips. Across Europe and in America, the attacked minorities and immigrants did not derive from one category or group. Racism did not quite cover this; neither did anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or anti-immigrant sentiment. Different kinds of outsiders were targeted in Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Austria, Russia, Sweden, France, Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and more. What had happened?
The history of our predicament has not yet been written. And the passing of time will no doubt expose our contemporary blind spots. Still, having studied the forms and major theoretical elaborations for stranger fear and hatred, what can we tentatively suggest? To consider this question, we need to flip our lens from its focus on individuals and small groups to the perspective with which our story began, zooming out to consider the macroscopic forces of Western history. Only then can we hope to understand how such varied locales all were swept up in the same xenophobic tide. What were the political forces, the “situation,” that rewarded such divisive thought and action, so much so that tribal hatred spread to so many nations? What conjectures can we offer that might aid some future, fuller history?
When Brexit and Trump’s election took place, many pundits and politicians argued that this was a delayed result of the 2008 stock-market meltdown. Others pointed to the European migrant crisis from Syria and North Africa, as well as the flow of humanity from Central America and Mexico into the United States. These arguments relied on the economic competition and cultural invasion models, and as we have seen, while these factors may be important, they remain insufficient. Whether it is a sudden global expansion, the collapse of empire, an influx of immigrants, or the devaluation of a currency, these social pressures by themselves do not explain how and why such troubles transform into xenophobia. Most economic suffering manifests as … well, economic suffering. Many communities have accommodated influxes of newcomers without turning on them. These narrow explanations obscure the essential riddle, which is how such stressors morph into our three-headed beast.
English usage of xenophobia via Google ngram
With Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, I too first followed the politicians and economists who suggested this was a delayed response to the 2008 crisis. Then I began to dig around. If the usage of “xenophobia” in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German was an accurate indicator, I found that a sudden, intense resurgence of the word had occurred years earlier. Alarms had been going off in all those languages, but I hadn’t heard them. And the inflection point from linear growth to a wild upswing came at an auspicious time, one that some historians like to call the end of the twentieth century.
THE CALENDAR YEAR of 1989 marked the beginning of a series of cataclysms that created a crisis of identity around the Western world. In the span of three years, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Cold War ended. In an astonishing and unprecedented turn, a global superpower peacefully gave up the ghost. Forty-five years of ideological war ended without a whimper. Almost no one was prepared for it. One of the orienting poles of a bipolar world had vanished. Disorder and confusion, personal and political, were inevitable. The collapse of the Soviet Union raised two monumental questions. What would happen when this gigantic entity dissolved? And what would happen to the United States, which had been so vigilantly poised against this Other for half a century, now that its nemesis was no more?
The Soviet Union was a massive land empire whose gobbled-up colonies contained over one hundred different ethnic groups. Their constitution defined citizens by ethnic-national identities—Armenian, Ukrainian, even the “nation” of the Jews. After Lenin, Soviet leaders understood that they had to manage a potential “nationalities” problem, especially in places like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which had already tasted autonomy. Police-state oppression secured the peace, and a forced commitment to Marxist ideology brought the many together in thought and identity.
Such collective unity was enhanced and further defined by a common ideological enemy: Western capitalism and its champion, the United States. Throughout the Soviet Union, Americans served as an example of all that the Soviets were not. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? What about the Ku Klux Klan? Freedom? To engage in what, shopping? To let wealth for some destroy the pursuit of happiness for most? These were Cold War tropes, coins of the realm that could be passed out whenever needed. They are the bigots, not us. They are empty and unhappy. We march for progress and a more egalitarian society. To question such dogma was, since Stalin’s show trials in 1936, potentially traitorous. And so, the same song was sung over and over again.
Meanwhile, an increasingly sclerotic Soviet leadership clung to ideological purity as the failures of their state-run economy mounted. After all, capitalism was in its “late” stages, not communism. Any movement toward a somewhat freer economy went against history and could seem tantamount to defection. Locked in by their dogma, the Soviets withered. Then a series of seemingly minor events proved to be cataclysmic. In 1979, Pope John Paul II visited Poland and with his tacit support, a year later, a trade union named Solidarity was born. Unlike revolts in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Soviets held their military back. After a year, Solidarity had ten million members. Meanwhile, American president Ronald Reagan had adopted a muscular foreign policy, seeking to foment nationalism in Warsaw Pact states and discard decades of prior commitments regarding nuclear weapons. The policy of mutually assured destruction (known as MAD) during the postwar years had been credited with both avoiding nuclear Armageddon and creating a massive arms race. Reagan sought to end that standoff; he dangled the prospect of denuclearization before the Soviets while openly funding a military buildup. Then rather fantastically, he announced that the United States would build a Strategic Defense System to shoot down incoming warheads. That of course meant the end of MAD and American victory. The claim itself was theater, the stuff of science fiction, and much derided in the press, but leaders in Moscow, filled with fantasies of their adversary’s power, grew terrified.
During this turbulent time, Soviet leadership reeked of decay. In the span of less than three years, a long-invalid Leonid Brezhnev, the frail Yuri Andropov, and the nearly catatonic Konstantin Chernenko, all died in office. As central authority teetered, regional aspirations grew. In 1985, a youthful Mikhail Gorbachev took office and recognized the need for reform. Four years later, he decided to allow the nations of Eastern Europe to decide their futures for themselves. In a flash, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, and Bulgaria waved goodbye. The gravitational pull that kept the Soviets’ spheres in their orbit had lost power. And the implosion did not end there. On December 31, 1991, after a tumult-filled two years, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics disbanded. The Soviet Union was no more.
What happened? Recently, the Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis deployed a scientific metaphor—criticality—to capture this stunning change. In chemistry, for example, a “critical” temperature marks the precise reading when, say, all of a liquid simultaneously becomes a gas. The criticality here, however, was of exactly what? The answer must be the union.
Authoritarian regimes, due to the intense levels of submission that they demand, are inherently fragile systems. Such regimes require a great abdication of individuality in exchange for the fulfillment of security and dependency needs. Internal dissatisfaction must be constantly managed, for little cracks can spread swiftly. One time-honored strategy to maintain internal order is to remain in a constant state of conflict with an enemy. War enhances communal bonds and encourages a regressive posture toward “our” protector, the supreme leader. That figurehead, however, must be vigilant, aware of the Wizard of Oz effect, by which a photo or revelation transforms the supreme leader into a short, plump fellow behind a curtain.
During the run-up to the Soviet collapse in 1991, much of that unwieldy machinery seized up. The Soviets were once again experiencing economic deprivation from their command economy, but they had survived that before. Now it was combined with a string of leaders who were a visibly pathetic, impotent set. Meanwhile, the Pope and Lech Walesa offered the possibility of an alternative community, one with more autonomy. And Western soft power with its jeans, sexual liberation, and rock and roll had diminished some of the disdain for the American enemy. As a backpacker visiting Prague in 1981, I witnessed that firsthand when I was adopted by a group of underground Lennonists. One night we crept down to a graffiti-filled wall, where, alongside anti-regime slogans, they had created a memorial to the recently murdered Beatle. Each morning, they gleefully informed me, the authorities would whitewash the wall. Every evening, they would return, wine bottles in hand, to sing half-garbled Dylan and Lennon songs, and rebuild their shrine. Eight years later, when the Berlin Wall fell, the Lennon Wall in Prague had become a legendary symbol of revolt.
The fall of the Soviet empire made a great many like those Lennonists rejoice. They could now imagine a future free of fear, spies, and persecution. Legions of silenced and scared citizens joyously celebrated this new day. For some, however, as Svetlana Alexievich so poignantly recorded, this was a nearly insupportable disaster. Proud, older comrades who once were buoyed by stereotypes of Western materialism and exploitation suddenly discovered they were no longer proletariats, just abjectly poor. Humiliated and afraid, a segment of this populace looked to ultranationalists like the grandiose Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who called for a return to a police state and played ethnic cards, such as calling for the expulsion of all “Asians” from eastern Russia. He also indulged in gross anti-Semitism despite—psychoanalysts would say due to—his own long-denied Jewish patrimony.
Reborn as an unregulated haven, plus capitaliste que les capitalistes, Russia now existed alongside Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Tajikistan, and Armenia. The possibility for rivalries within and between these states was great, as each sought to define and reinforce their borders while creating binding commitments that distinguished them from neighbors who, until very recently, were submerged in the same empire. Populists like the puffed-up Zhirinovsky latched on to an old, pre-Soviet enemy or a historical grievance so as to rally his bereft and frightened constituents, urging them to identify with and take comfort in him. This was a model that Vladimir Putin refined and employed as he gradually assumed dictatorial powers.
What would happen to the new nations that coalesced as the Soviet Union crumbled? The threat of war over ethnic, religious, and national differences loomed large. It became a horrific reality in Yugoslavia, which experienced the worst outbreak of xenophobic violence since 1945. In this multiethnic federation, the iron-fisted, communist rule of Josip Tito had glued together four languages, three religions, and at least five ethnic groups. With Tito’s death in 1980, a glaring absence of leadership followed. After all, the very idea of the nation had been embodied in his person, and the constitution forbade anyone from succeeding him. Somehow the nation held on, but the collapse of the Soviet Union further destabilized its wobbly neighbor. In 1991, Yugoslavia splintered into five: Serbia-Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Croatia. Slovenia and Croatia were Catholic, while the southern regions were a mix of Orthodox Christians and Muslims.
Ethnic nationalists and religious competitors turned on once fellow countrymen. Stereotypes in the local media revived tribal identities and fears. War broke out first in Croatia, then in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and from there it continued to spread. In Serbia, the would-be successor to Tito, Slobodan Milošević, began to rail against “foreigners” like Croats. The ensuing wars lasted eight years and resulted in a genocide, directed by the likes of Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladić. In 1993, an international war crimes tribunal was created at the Hague to finally make good on Raphael Lemkin’s work: as the Cold War ended, other international bodies like the International Criminal Court would also soon take up this task. In the end, Milošević, Mladić, and 161 others were indicted at the Hague for genocide and crimes against humanity. By then, three hundred thousand former Yugoslavs were dead and three million had gone into exile.
The collapse of Yugoslavia seemed to be a harbinger of more xenophobic battles to come. For in the newly liberated Warsaw Pact states, the Soviets had yielded power to … well, save for Solidarity in Poland, there were few established parties to whom one might hand power. Instead, a vacuum was quickly filled by populists who called for a return to a homogenous, nationalist identity as well as homegrown democrats, identified with Europe. With an array of new countries hoisting their flags, the American political scientist John Mearsheimer predicted a return to pre–Cold War times, with more gruesome battles to come over national identity. Experts documented a resurgence of European nationalism. Around 1995, a number of scholars declared that post–Cold War Europe had become plagued by a “new xenophobia.”
Miraculously, however, much of the reshuffling that occurred after the fall of the Soviets remained peaceful. Even in multiethnic Czechoslovakia, after some struggle, the Czechs and Slovaks simply decided to go separate ways. Bloodshed was likely averted in part because, just as the Soviets were cracking up, Europe was pulling itself together. The European Union, established in 1992, offered a new, supranational identity that allowed local democrats to outflank xenophobic populists. The EU also offered a common currency and the full, free circulation of goods, services, and people. Open internal borders meant immigration between member states was relatively effortless. Centered around a reunified Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, the EU set out to transform the region into an economic colossus ensured by a military alliance, NATO. For the sudden nation-states of the former Soviet Union, the desire to join this club was powerful, helping anti-populists gain traction. If their nations ascribed to democratic, tolerant norms and managed to keep their debt and deficits within a proscribed range, they could join Europe. While it is hard to prove a negative, it seems likely that the rise of the European Union undermined xenophobic forces and saved lives.
Not everyone, however, was sold on this union. Put to a plebiscite, Denmark and Switzerland rejected the proposal, and the United Kingdom and Sweden barely rounded up the majority needed to ratify their admission. Among the recalcitrant, there was an understandable unease about handing national fiscal policy to Brussels. Not so for the new nations on the periphery of Europe, who continued to seize this opportunity. By 1999, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary signed up, and five years later, others came on board including Bulgaria, Croatia, and Latvia. The European Union seemed to bring to a happy end what had been a devastating century for the so-called civilized Western world. And while worries about xenophobia surged after the collapse of the Soviet empire, one could be thankful that there was one Yugoslavia, not many.
However, when the 2008 crisis hit, lingering conflicts in the European Union burst into the open. Resentment came forward from nations who had shouldered much of the cost for bailing out the highly leveraged, nearly bankrupt nations of Spain and Greece. Local producers and workers in various nations worried that their governments would not protect them, given their EU commitments.
Despite these centrifugal pressures, debates continued over whether the EU should continue to grow. If so, who should rightly be considered? What were the ethnic, religious, or geographic limits of the EU? These long-debated questions became acute with the case of Turkey. Atatürk’s nation pitched itself to the EU by heralding its secular status. Geographically, it was almost entirely not part of the European continent, yet, if admitted, Turkey would become the second-largest and one of the poorest member states. Official negotiations began in 2004 but stalled, and they stayed that way. This was hardly a surprise, for Turkey had been briskly moving away from the EU’s requirements. Under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the country had become less democratic, less secular, and less tolerant. By 2008, the Turks were nowhere near acceptance into the union, but their futile efforts to gain admission were seized upon by Nigel Farage and others in the United Kingdom, who raised grave fears about an impending invasion of Turkish immigrants. This, I discovered, was the source of the worried gossip I had overheard in that London sweater shop.
After the crash of 2008, an array of anti–European Union, anti-globalization nationalists came up from the cellar. Some, like the Le Pens in France, had been toiling away since the early 1970s, earning the father, Jean-Marie, a conviction for inciting racist hatred thanks to his Holocaust denial. After years of demonizing Arabs and Jews, it seemed he and his daughter’s time had come. In the once mighty empire of Great Britain, nostalgia combined with resentment against their increasingly multicultural capital and the imperious demands coming from Brussels. In France and Great Britain, nativist slogans like “France for the French” and “England for the English” made a return from the dark corners of pre–World War II history. Anti-immigrant nationalists emerged into the mainstream. In the wake of Islamicist terrorism, politicians like Nicolas Sarkozy in France and David Cameron in Great Britain did not just denounce radical fanaticism, but declared the principle of multiculturalism to be dead. Alongside the retreat of these centrists, openly xenophobic populists—some harboring fond memories of midcentury fascism—stepped forward in Hungary, Italy, Poland, Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Anti-immigrant Brexit poster, 2016
Long-standing xenophobic fantasies of foreign invasion were given tangible form when, three years after the economic crash, desperate immigrants began to wash up on Europe’s shores. In 2011, the Syrian and North African migrant crisis erupted and built to a peak four years later. A shivering mass of Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghanis, as well as Albanians and Kosovans, desperately sought asylum. They came to Hungary, Austria, Sweden, Italy, France, and, most of all, Germany. These foreigners embodied helplessness, that same desperate state many Westerners had just experienced as their savings vaporized. If such a mutual experience of vulnerability brought forth sympathy from many, it also made others consider these refugees to be a threat and an intolerable burden. As large as this migration was, nativists in host countries dramatically overestimated their numbers and the amount of government aid they received.
Caught up in complex economic turmoil, no longer solely in control of their monetary policy or their borders, unclear if their local leaders had the power or will to protect their own interests, a growing number of Europeans found a tangible source for their discontent in an alien Other. Some nations that once embraced the idea of a unified Europe registered their distress by turning to authoritarian nationalists, who offered security and safety by focusing their rage on the half-drowned refugees on their shores. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán ratcheted up his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric and built a wall to repel the migrants. Soon he would move on from Muslims to grand, anti-Jewish conspiracy theories involving that advocate of open societies, George Soros. In Germany, Angela Merkel’s policies welcomed one million Syrian migrants and ushered forth a far-right reaction. The extremist Alternative for Germany was founded in 2013, and four years later, it was the third-largest party in that country. Most of its early followers lived far from the urban centers that hosted many immigrants, but they nonetheless railed against these intruders. In the first six months of 2019 alone, Germany recorded over 4000 violent attacks by xenophobes from the extreme right.
IN THE UNITED STATES, the swift end of the Cold War caused a stunned, disorienting euphoria. Kremlinologists were almost universally befuddled when this so-called mighty superpower proved to be feeble. What had they missed? Primed to assess the Soviet threat, ready to leap into action and prevent a nuclear assault, had they been blind to their enemy’s frailty? Years of Cold War stereotypes built up the threat of the “Evil Empire” and primed Americans to miss the big story.
President George H. W. Bush conceded that he and his advisers were utterly taken aback by the USSR’s collapse. When the dust cleared, Bush proclaimed the rise of a New World Order, a unipolar world in which American military power, individualism, free-market capitalism, and democracy reigned. “Neoliberalism”—with its rejection of the welfare state—now stood triumphant. Right-wing attacks on the safety net—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—were redoubled, launched from the high ground of ideological supremacy. “Trickle-down” economics, inaugurated nearly a decade earlier by Ronald Reagan, continued to magically justify cutting taxes on the wealthy. Opponents who questioned this were said, in an Orwellian turn of phrase, to be engaged in class warfare. Governments and centralized bureaucracies no longer were the solution; they needed to get out of the way of the private sector. An obscure State Department official named Francis Fukuyama wondered if humanity’s final acceptance of Western capitalism and liberal democracy represented the “end of history.”
History, it turned out, had a few tricks in store. The demise of the Reds was a bigger problem for the Red, White, and Blue than first imagined. When the celebrations ended, America had lost something, too. For nearly fifty years, this diverse, multicultural nation, which cherished its exceptionalism, had in part defined itself by being armed and ready to confront a clear and common enemy. Its running conflict with the totalitarian Soviets had been an ennobling battle that helped highlight America’s commitment to liberty and to being the leaders of the free world. The specter of the Soviet Union unified Americans who were urban and rural, white and minority, traditional and progressive, as well as rich and poor. Victory ended that.
When the militaristic Romans defeated the long-detested Carthaginians, that grand day, Sallust determined, was followed by decades of internal rivalry and civil war. After 1991, with the Soviets gone, American political life similarly became more riven. The traditional left, those onetime champions of labor, were upended by the victory of free-market economics. Liberals turned their focus more to the expansion of individual and civil rights. Many moderate Democrats followed Bill Clinton’s third way and stepped back from economic justice and statist interventions, all of which now reeked of failed Soviet models. Meanwhile, Republican Cold Warriors were even more disoriented. They had lost their raison d’être. What was their role in this New World Order? Many turned their sights toward reviving a more traditional, Christian America, which meant defeating their secular and cosmopolitan compatriots.
The 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center provided new enemies and old answers. Islamic terrorists like al-Qaeda were small fry by American geopolitical standards, but they now had murdered more citizens on our homeland than any before them. As for negative stereotypes, these extremists were right out of Hollywood’s central casting: swarthy, fanatical, and willing to die just to kill Americans. In the years following 9/11, Muslims became, for the old Cold Warriors, a new American enemy, adding weight to the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s prediction—some argued his fervent wish—that with the Soviets gone, a clash between the Western and Islamic civilizations was inevitable. Xenophobia made a comeback, as rote stereotypes of Muslims and Arabs from Hollywood and Madison Avenue flooded the American imagination. After the terrorist strikes on New York, while President George W. Bush admirably stated that our ensuing wars were not against Islam, the cynical run-up to the war in Iraq demonstrated that Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Arabs in general could be lumped together to serve as a unifying Other.
However, it was neither Communism nor radical Islam that nearly felled the United States. If 1991 marked the final sigh of the Soviets, 2008 was the year that brought the Cold War victors to their knees. The dangers, it turned out, were internal. While the Soviets showcased how a state-controlled economy could shrivel, America demonstrated how unregulated capitalism could spin out of control. Starting in 1979, income disparities had grown so that, by 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that a measure of inequality, the Gini index, was the highest ever. Under Ronald Reagan, American policy makers not only cut taxes on the wealthiest but also began to loosen restrictions on banks. Depression-era policies were repealed, and despite a nearly immediate crisis, deregulation continued. Markets, it was said, would “self-regulate,” a fancier and more pretentious way of abiding by Adam Smith’s faith in “sympathy” and the market’s invisible hand. Obscure investment vehicles like derivatives were liberated from oversight; freedom was on the march. This ideology found its apogee in 2004, when the regulatory body, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, proposed that financial institutions be allowed to oversee themselves. The fox was in the henhouse, and not just in the United States; the leader of the free world had spread the same model of unrestrained markets around the globe.
Meanwhile, the emergence of the Internet brought forth global synergies, mergers, and growth. A newly interconnected world was busy being born, when suddenly there was a terrifying sound. In 2008, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers exploded. This set off a chain of reactions that led to the meltdown of the equities market and the tottering of too-big-to-fail banks. Like Watson’s quivering Little Albert, citizens looked on, unable to comprehend where all the pain was coming from. After inquiring, they heard about the Clinton-era repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, complex instruments like credit default swaps, and repackaged subprime mortgages. The crash of 2008 inaugurated the worst American economic contraction since 1929. The untrammeled forces of freedom had nearly self-immolated. No one was sure the global economy would survive. The president of the sole superpower was reported to have exclaimed, “This sucker could go down.”
When the United States had had their nemesis, no matter what trouble brewed at home, there was a likely cause in Boris Badenov and his Stalinist ilk. In a unipolar world, however, Americans had no one to blame for this sudden impoverishment, this helplessness and fear. The greatest military in world history was useless. Economic shock, humiliation, and resentment were now the lot of many in the richest nation on earth. Polarization increased between the wealthy and a slipping middle class, between a shrinking white majority and a rainbow of minorities, and between those positioned to benefit from expanding, global commerce and those left behind. Toleration was put to the test as twenty-four-hour cable news stations featured screaming partisans who furthered these divides. As hot-button issues were stoked, Americans spun apart as if in a centrifuge. Many seemed to be willing to vote against their own interests and close their eyes to blatant realities so as to remain secure within their own political tribe. Group ideologies solidified distrust of the other side and transformed suspicion into a rigid, unyielding hatred of the American Other. Whole states committed to the same conclusion before the facts: they were in the bag as red or blue. Swing states swayed, studies showed, due to the waxing and waning of white grievances against Blacks and immigrants.
The election of Barack Obama, who, unlike his opponent, demonstrated great poise in the midst of the Wall Street meltdown, was a watershed moment. It demonstrated the diminished force of racism for a majority of Americans, and it also fueled a furious backlash. The New York developer and television personality Donald Trump wildly decried the election of this foreigner, this illegitimate, “Nigerian-born” president. Tea Party populists, stirred up by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, denounced the browning of America and its flood of immigrants. Migrants, it was said, were threats, economically, criminally, and culturally. Statistics did not bear this out, but no matter. Trump’s nativist, anti-immigration stances and his devotion to building a wall on the southern border were portrayed as sticking up for besieged whites. His carnival show included baiting and belittling an array of minorities, stoking contempt and fear of Mexican and Muslim immigrants, and trafficking in contemptuous views of women, not to mention Hispanic and Black Americans. This would-be demagogue seemed to be searching for whatever negative stereotypes of the Other would stick, and in the fall of 2016, many of us discovered to our shock that a startling number had done just that.
WHAT HAD HAPPENED? By 2016, the belief in a New World Order with neoliberalism as its guiding ideology had come undone. A number of Western nations had retreated behind their borders. Some flirted with strongmen, who focused their followers’ rage and helplessness on a chosen outsider. It took some doing not to realize that these attacks on different kinds of foreigners and minorities were not isolated events, but I must admit, I was one of the blind men. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to reports out of Austria. The Poles? Hungarians? What did that have to do with me? In 2016, I realized, the answer was a great deal. The postwar order, off balance since the victory of the West, now had hurtled off the tracks. Newly empowered voices, oblivious to the post-Holocaust moral order, emerged. Xenophobia had come back from the dead.
The extent of this reawakening remains to be seen. It seems inevitable that there will be a reckoning, for despite this retreat behind hardened borders, many of the most desperate challenges we face remain global. Overpopulation, competition for limited natural resources, tragic numbers of asylum seekers and refugees, public health crises that do not respect national borders: all these are pressing twenty-first-century problems that can only be solved internationally. How much does it cost to purchase a nuclear weapon on the black market in the Baltics? Not enough. What is the next virus to hop from animals and terrorize mankind? Speculation is back on Wall Street; the result could be mass unemployment in far-off lands. Artificial intelligence, powerful new forms of propaganda, and cyber-warfare are potential threats that remain hard to fully fathom. Like nuclear weapons after Hiroshima, this novel force will remain deeply destabilizing until some international armistice can be negotiated. Automation and the loss of work may also make for millions of bereft souls who refuse to stay put, as their opportunities evaporate. And, most dauntingly of all, climate change bears down upon us. If unchecked, it will make crops fail and droughts impossible to endure. Water shortages, deforestation, and desertification will make for eco-exiles, perhaps in massive numbers. If patterns of weather, that very basic foundation for sedentary civilization, become chaotic and altered, how many more will be forced to turn back to migratory existences?
At the same time, each little corner of the world has been overrun. Like the waves of change brought forth by the telegraph, telephone, mass media, and moving pictures, an expanded, virtual reality now has swept through our lives. Digital technologies have muddied the very boundaries between the strangers and their hosts. What will it mean to be virtual in one’s identity and social affiliations, to be more a member of a virtual nation, than one’s own? Identity theft is not just a problem with credit cards; it is a metaphor. Our online “homes” may be invaded and occupied by unseen entities. We rightly worry that invisible beings steal our data, hack our histories, and feed us fake stories. They may control our beliefs, our behaviors, even our minds. Knowledge, the very basis of open, secular societies and the backbone of democracy, now comes to many of us through the most powerful propaganda tool ever constructed. Do gadgets once meant to connect you with a high-school flame ignite riots, get presidents elected, and foment mass murder? They already have. Welcome to the twenty-first century.
These disruptions are ones no nation-state alone can manage. The answers must be global as well as local. That requires tacking back and forth, not just in our politics and policies but, as the problem of xenophobia makes clear, in our identities. How can I be defined by my difference—my personal experiences, my language, my nation, my heritage, my needs, desires, and choices—and at the same time remain identified with all those foreigners in my nation, in my species? How can I advocate for my own parochial interests, while also not ending up like Albert Camus, necessarily choosing my motherland over justice? For the poet Walt Whitman, the answer was radical empathy; I contain, he famously wrote, multitudes. One of Whitman’s heirs, the postwar poet A. R. Ammons, put it in less heroic terms. We should not strive to be “homogenous pudding,” but rather:
united differences, surface difference expressing the common, underlying hope and fate of each person and people, a gathering into one place of multiple dissimilarity, each culture to its own cloth and style and tongue and gait, each culture, like the earth itself with commonlode center and variable surface …
Integrated minds, the poet wrote, made for an integrated nation, and the possibility of unity between nations. Conversely, unified nations help to foster the psychic integration of their citizens. As we have seen, xenophobia is debilitating and distorting on our inner lives, our local communities, and our broader political world. All of us possess the “commonlode center” as well as the diverse richness of surface variety. Universal human rights and radical egalitarianism reside in the former; toleration, cultural relativity, and local adaptations in the latter. Given our new global horizons, we cannot but strive to embody these truths and be, in this manner, two-minded.
We have no better choice. While some may yearn for simpler times, pressing problems preclude taking care of our own and forgetting the rest. Whether we like it or not, whether by peace or war, whether by authoritarian fiat or democratic resolve, the immediate future will be determined by our capacity to solve global dilemmas. Some will seek a semblance of order and safety through division and the falling in hate with some outsider. Since that path leads to head-in-the-sand self-destructiveness and spirals of violence, the other path must be our hope. On that road we may find mutual aid, merger, hybridization, and new possibilities.
Powerful societies succeed because they integrate the new into the old. Cooperation and assimilation have made for wonders, like the millions who peacefully coexist outside my New York City door. Thanks to these forces, in 2019, measures of literacy, extreme poverty, and life expectancy have never been better for our species. Every second, as Emmanuel Levinas reminded us, strangers take care of each other, and, more so, they see it as their responsibility. With that as our guide, might we not come together in new ways and forge greater commonality, an even wider us?
For such hopes not to be vacuous, much must be done. New norms and self-aware institutions must help us weed out the invasive species of stereotypes, fears, and assumptions that fill our minds. To lessen xenophobia, we must develop ways to diminish the need for this rigid buttress for the self. Such prescriptions, I know, might lead the hard-headed to despair. And yet, as this history has demonstrated, cultures adapt, at times rapidly. What reader in Paris would have guessed that only decades after learning of xenophobia by the Boxers in China, that this term would take on its present meanings? We now stand in a long line of those who risked a great deal to create that shift. They threw themselves on top of the explosive trouble we once again confront. Thanks to these forebearers, we come to this crisis carrying concepts, forms of analysis, collective memories, and moral commandments. It may seem laughable that we should go into this battle so poorly armed. However, words and ideas do things; they change the way we think and act. Xenophobia is one such word, and with its rise there comes the hope that we too can stop the floods of hatred before they rush forth again.