UKIP and the
seductive power of ‘Heimat’
The surge of UKIP
in this week’s local elections, and the influence they may have on where
political power lies in the future, has shaken the political establishment. But
why are people attracted to the party? What message is being sent out by the
voters who support it?
Clearly it is an
anti-immigrant vote. It is tempting to dismiss them as Moe Szyslaks:
“Immigants! I knew it was them! Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them”
(The Simpsons: Much ado about Apu).
But there is
something else happening, perhaps, that is reflected in UKIP’s popularity, a
mythological element, and UKIP reflect the power of myth. That is not only the
power of popular myths about immigration and its effects, but also deeper
mythologies, about what lies outside the boundaries of the nation and what lies
at its centre.
The mythology of
the ‘outside’ focuses on the immigrant is some kind of mythic threat, like a
vampire.
That myth can take
various forms. For example, we have to protect ourselves from those who want to
over-consume liberal resources and drain the liberal state of its ability to
supply liberal goods -- the immigrant as a resource-sucking vampire, over here
to claim benefits, misuse the NHS, take our jobs and so on.
Or we have to
protect our sense of community and identity from those who are so different
that they can’t be assimilated, and so would undermine the community solidarity
that we need for welfare institutions and democracy. Indeed, they may even have
the power to counter-assimilate members and change their identity, with their
strange customs and traditions.
Or at the extreme
we need to protect ourselves from those who will bring with them disorder and
chaos -- the immigrant infects the liberal state with disorder, eventually
destroying it, the immigrant as a vampiric disease-carrier. They will bring
crime and violence with them, in the shape of gangsters and suicide bombers.
But note that this
mythic view of what lies outside the border rests on a mythic view of what lies
within it, that which needs protection. So what is it that needs to be
protected from the migrant?
On the face of it,
our welfare services, traditions and communities need protection, but I think
there is something deeper here that UKIP appeal to, and the idea of ‘Heimat’
that we find in much European thought helps us understand this.
The idea of Heimat
is found in the German-speaking world. ‘Heimat’ is an extraordinarily complex
idea and I can’t hope to do it justice here, but it captures the feeling of
being at home, or, more accurately, is a reaction to the experience of not feeling at home.
In other words,
‘Heimat’ is a reactive idea, a reaction against the fluidity and change
experienced under conditions of modernity, which result in alienation and a
feeling of lost-ness. Heimat is an idea of a place where one really belongs,
and so is an imaginary home set up against our experience of alienation. It is
essentially backward looking and nostalgic, and so it does not exist in the
present. But equally it does not exist in the past.
Although it is a
place, and exists in the past in one sense, it is not a place that has ever
existed. It is an imaginary place when things were, we are told, more innocent
and simple and stable: it is motion-less and change-less.
Elizabeth Boa and
Rachel Palfreyman tell us: “Key oppositions in the discourse of Heimat set
country against city, province against metropolis, tradition against modernity,
nature against artificiality, organic culture against civilization, fixed,
familiar, rooted identity against cosmopolitanism and hybridity, alien
otherness, or the faceless mass” (Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman Heimat:
a German dream – regional loyalties and national identity in German culture
1890-1990 (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 2).
This place of
Heimat is not open to rational criticism. When people say things were better in
the past, pointing out to them that this past has never actually existed – it
is an imaginary reaction to the present -- brings about no change in their
nostalgia. And although as an idea ‘Heimat’ has played a role in both right and
left politics in Germany, one key element of it is mistrust of the outsider,
whose presence is at least one cause of the loss of ‘Heimat’.
Boa and Palfreyman
again: “Heimat must always be ultimately bounded and defined through visible or
hidden exclusion of the radically different and alien” (p.27). And: “Who must
be excluded and who can be integrated are as crucial to a community as who is
from the start included: a place is as much defined by its others as by the
self” (p. 28).
And Peter Blickle
says: “… the idealization of a home ground in Heimat has led again and again to
borders of exclusion” (Heimat: a critical theory of the German idea of
homeland (Camden House, Rochester, NY, 2002), pp.
157-158).
And so the
mistrust of motion and those who move is deeply embedded in the idea of
‘Heimat’. This mistrust certainly extends throughout European thought. Tim
Cresswell explains: “…the whole apparatus of state bureaucracy in most
countries has long depended on the notion that people should live, work, pay
taxes and vote in a fixed location, so that to be of no fixed abode is already
to be a suspicious character, and mobility itself comes to be seen as a form of
geographical deviance.”
Mobility as
deviance comes from “the positive valuation of roots in a place-bound,
property-owning society…”, where “mobility…appears to be a kind of
superdeviance … [which] disturbs the whole notion that the world can be segregated
into clearly defined places … [and] becomes a basic form of disorder and chaos
– constantly defined as transgression and trespass.” (Tim Cresswell Inplace/Out
of place (University of Minnesota Press 1996) pp.
85-87).
This mistrust of
motion certainly informed the anti-semitism of the German fascist movement.
Hitler said “…it is impossible that those who are at home everywhere [by which
he means the Jews] can know what Heimat is, because they do not have one.” And
we need to remember that this mistrust of motion and the mobile extends
throughout European thought. We have to keep reminding ourselves that the
anti-semitism that led to the Holocaust was European-wide, not confined the
Germany.
Although the idea
of Heimat is explicit in the German-speaking world and has no simple equivalent
in the English-speaking world, I have no doubt that it is present in the way we
think.
Patrick Wright’s
description of ‘Englishness’ in his article, “Last orders for the English
aborigine”, certainly fits the model. This Englishness “…finds its essence in
that sense of being opposed to the prevailing trends of the present. It’s a
perspective that allows even the most well-placed man of the world to imagine
himself a member of an endangered aboriginal minority: a freedom fighter
striking out against ‘alien’ values and the infernal workings of a usurping
state” (Patrick Wright, “Last orders for the English aborigine”, in Sally
Davison & Jonathan Rutherford (eds), Race, Identity and Belonging: A
Soundings Collection, (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 2008), p. 63)
At its heart is an
idea of England “…in which the very thought of difference or change is
instantly identified with degeneration, corruption and death” (p.69).
What we learn from
the idea of Heimat is that this is accompanied by a nostalgia for a lost
England which was a purer, more innocent place. The danger is, of course, that
people will struggle to restore this mythic purity, this mythic innocence, by
cleansing the nation of that which has corrupted it.
All the evidence
shows that the mythic idea of ‘Heimat’ is here, like a so-far-undetected black
hole, exerting enormous cultural power that can distort ethical and rational
principles. It is anti-theoretical, anti-intellectual. The facts will not get
in the way.
This presents
those of us who wish to confront anti-immigration politics with a very
difficult challenge. I have been in rooms of people who I consider to be
intelligent and well-informed, but who have been transformed into an irrational
rage when it comes to discussions of immigration, and who displayed a stubborn
refusal to even consider any empirical evidence on the question, and who
replied to my arguments with mythologies.
I have no answer
to this challenge here, except to alert those of us who do wish to pursue
evidence-based arguments to the seductive power of ‘Heimat’. But Patrick
Wright’s description of “an endangered aboriginal minority: a freedom fighter
striking out against ‘alien’ values and the infernal workings of a usurping
state” perfectly captures what is at the heart of UKIP and their appeal.
The complexity of
that appeal lies in the fact that, although the migrant is the object of the
hostility, it is because they symbolize change, modernization, globalization,
all things that disrupt tradition and the sense of ‘home’ people carry with
them, an imaginary ‘home’ which never existed, and yet which must be defended
from change.