Paecilomyces lilacinus

nationalism, and the effects it has.The character of US nationalism is something that for historical reasons appears difficult to examine dispassionately; it tends either to be endorsed, condemned, or, most often, excluded altogether from consideration (Rajagopal 2004).

Discussions of US media coverage can be clarified, however, by bringing in the issue of nationalism, since it is the over-arching frame within which news stories relating to national security are shaped. Unfortunately analysis of media coverage has been state-centric for the most part, focusing on war and terrorism, on violence by and against the US state in short.That is, the events have been treated along the lines of foreign news, where the media invariably follow the lead of the State Department and the Pentagon (see, for example, Gans 1979; Hallin 1989;

on post-September 11 media coverage see Zelizer and Allan 2002).

Accordingly, critical commentary on the work of the news media has tended to focus on the sources of support for US policy, e.g. on channels like Fox News.

Fox News is only the most prominent instance of a new kind of candor dawning on the news media, proving that the avowal of neutrality in the news is not a constraint. To the contrary, abandoning it for national chauvinism helps increase audiences.The extent of the effect of such reporting is becoming clear.

Polls suggest that over 60 percent of Americans held at least one of three mistaken impressions about the recent war in Iraq, contributing to much of the popular support for the war.These impressions were as follows: they believed that US forces found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; that Saddam Hussein helped in the attacks on September 11; and, finally, that other nations either backed the US-led war or were evenly split between supporting and opposing it. In fact, no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq; there is no clear evidence that Saddam was involved in the September 11 attack of 2001; and large majorities opposed the war in most countries (as seen for instance in Gallup polls). Eighty percent of those who relied on Fox News had such misperceptions, compared to 71 percent of those who said they relied on CBS News; the comparable figures were 47 percent for those who said they relied most on newspapers and maga-zines, and 23 percent for those who said they relied on PBS or National Public Radio.² This is not simply a problem of biased media. If there were not a prior recep-tivity, such reports could not proliferate. Indeed, Fox News congratulates itself on discovering an immense audience for ‘patriotism’ that it has now brought to the attention of other news media. I suggest that it is not useful simply to condemn the resulting news coverage. Even if Fox News is aberrant, it may reflect aspects of national culture that call for dispassionate inquiry, e.g. as to why such treatment finds such wide support. Even critical scholarship on news coverage after September 11, however, has tended to respect certain tacit bound-aries of interrogation, as a result of which nationalist sentiment within the USA has not come properly into focus as a subject requiring understanding.

Cokie Roberts, a well-known commentator on National Public Radio, was asked on air whether there had been domestic reaction against the bombing in Afghanistan. She replied,‘None that mattered’ (cited in McChesney 2002). Critics of pro-US media coverage have frequently described such coverage as ‘patriotic’ or at times ‘jingoistic’.This represents an interesting choice of term, and a tacit avoid-ance of the issue of nationalism. For instavoid-ance, James Carey admiringly cites ‘a courageous essay’ by Joan Konner that regretted the curtain of prescribed patrio-tism that descended over the media at this time (Carey 2002: 88).

Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out that the two terms, patriotism and nation-alism, are distinct and not to be confused with each other. Patriotism refers to the sentiment subjects have for king and country, which may carry over to the modern state; nationalism refers to people’s relationship with each other, one that may or may not be emblematized in a party or state (Hobsbawm 1993). It is not simply the presence or absence of pro-state sentiment, then, that is the issue, but a matter of how individuals perceive and accommodate their differences with each other. Nationalism arises in the age of democracy, and is a republican polit-ical formation, characterized by horizontal ties of citizenship rather than the more vertical links of traditional hierarchy. Routinely, however, this issue was obscured by assertions or denunciations of the need for ‘loyalty’. Debates on the news following the attacks centered on the eclipse of irony and the re-emergence of a positive, committed journalism, one that even critical scholars welcomed (see for example Rosen 2002; Schudson 2002). In the mean time, thousands of foreigners and/or immigrants were being arrested and detained without charges. Many of them were denied legal representation and deported summarily. There was widespread criticism of such abuses of civil liberties, but such events fell into the category of local or domestic news, and, except in marginal commentary, could not be seen as tied to the nationalist politics being pursued abroad. In fact, nation-alism was seen as exclusive to foreign affairs; within the USA, there were only decent people and bigots.

It was instructive to witness reactions to the events of September 11 when they occurred. I live in New York, and watched the World Trade Center towers fall down that morning, in a crowd on the corner of Franklin Street and West Broadway not far from what is now called Ground Zero.The scene of destruction was a riveting one. People were jumping to their deaths from above as the build-ings were aflame and, when the towers came down, the clouds of smoke were barreling through the canyon-like streets. None of us could have felt entirely secure. One man was sobbing into his cell phone, ‘I was supposed to be on that

@#$%ing building!’ Several people were weeping, and they became a magnet for attention, perhaps expressing what others could not, or reflecting what others had not experienced. Two gentlemen in suits were talking, speculating on what road they could use to exit Manhattan. I tried to join the conversation, asking

about the viability of another route. But with my entry, the topic changed. ‘It must have been bin Laden who did it,’ one of them said, looking at me to see if I would confirm or deny this idea. I was caught off-guard and had no idea what to say. I was not clear why he thought I would have any information on the subject.

Here was a delicate reflection of a response to the disaster. My foreignness became the pivot of the interaction, and a familiar enemy was being sought. I had posed one question, and the man had, effectively, responded with another, reflecting his own deeper concerns.When I shared this story with some friends, they thought I was reading too much into it, and perhaps I was. But in the days that followed, the search for foreigners to blame began to be carried on at all levels of society.³

The War on Terror at home after September 11

As mentioned above, the civil rights of hundreds of immigrants held after September 11 were violated; there was ‘a pattern of physical and verbal abuse’ at a federal prison where 84 of them were held, according to a report issued by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. Citizens of more than 20 countries were among the 762 detainees surveyed.The inquiry focused on two detention facilities that housed the majority of the detainees. In each case, immi-gration laws had been violated in some way, the report found. No bail was allowed for ‘terrorism suspects’, who remained in jail for an average of three months. In addition, detainees faced overwhelming difficulties and weeks of delay before they were allowed to make phone calls and find lawyers. Some were kept for months in cells where the light was kept on 24 hours a day, and were escorted in handcuffs, leg irons, and waist chains. Some detainees in one Brooklyn deten-tion facility reported that they were slammed against walls and taunted by guards, reports that inspectors found plausible (Fainaru 2002). The Justice Department issued a public notice asking undocumented immigrants to register without fear of being deported, and proceeded to use that information to find people to deport. More than 80,000 were registered, and more than 13,000 of them subse-quently faced deportation proceedings. In addition, many thousands of people of

‘Arab’ origin were summoned by the US Attorney General for investigation (Swains 2003). South Asians for their part discovered that the boundary between the Middle East and South Asia, which during centuries past had been porous, once again became an open border, at least in the USA. Hundreds of physical and verbal attacks against South Asians were reported in the following months, according to the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (2003).

Pakistanis in fact comprised more than twice the number of federal detainees from any other country, and scores of them were deported, causing them to leave their families behind. It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that race, religion,

and nationality were all involved in the targeting of foreigners, however erratic the assault.

This suggests that, however important each of these categories may be individ-ually, none of them is by itself sufficient to understand how boundaries are redrawn between Americans and others in the domestic context.Taken together, however, these terms comprise a general sense of foreignness that marks each of the encounters noted above.

Foreigners and the open society

Although there is an extensive scholarly literature on immigration, the problem addressed is typically that of assimilation, using the figure of a melting-pot society as both description and norm. US race relations have dominated the discussions, with the black–white polarity structuring the patterns of assimila-tion. Over the past two centuries, new immigrants, especially those from outside Northern and Western Europe, when they entered the USA, have been positioned closer to blacks than to whites. Their struggle for acceptance over the years has been, in effect, a matter of winning the right to be treated as white. African Americans have not had this privilege, of course, and their battles to make room for racial difference is one of the more important chal-lenges to pre-existing forms of US national identity. In the wake of September 11, however, we are reminded that the foreigner is in fact an empty category within which race, religion, and national difference may figure singly or together, and points to a strange ambivalence in a nation that prides itself as being built by immigrants.What aspects of US history and culture might illumi-nate this ambivalence?

The USA considers itself to represent the future of the world. Such a self-image is no mere flight of fancy. Enlightenment thinkers saw the USA as a new world where society could be imagined anew without impediments inherited from the ancien régime. Part of the USA’s identity is that it is an open society, exemplified by its embrace of immigrants as the makers of the USA.

The root of nation is natio, to be born; even where nationality is technically open, the word imputes a common birth to its claimants. But in the USA this meant some-thing like a political birth, accepting a set of values about citizenship and government. It is worth recalling that the USA is the first post-revolutionary nation. (The American Revolution occurred before the French one, and, what’s more, the USA did not lapse into monarchy thereafter.) As such, there is a widespread consciousness about the polit-ically formed character of the society. In few other nations is the Constitution so widely invoked, or constitutional rights so broadly asserted, with the idea of politics at the center of its normative structure.This points to its vulnerability to the kind of central-ized power and despotism that Alexis de Tocqueville warned of. But it also illuminates

the rapidity with which some previously central aspects have changed, stimulated by a combination of social movements and legislation.Thus, for instance, civil rights effected a sea change in race relations over a remarkably short period of time. My purpose is neither to idealize what was achieved, nor to diminish the magnitude of the problems that remain. It is rather to underline the unusual rapidity with which habitual race discrimination was diminished, in many cases quite sharply.This indicates, I suggest, the political character of US society.This should be recalled when we are tempted to make assertions about US society as having fixed tendencies of one kind or another.

There are other countries equally or more reliant on immigrants. Bonnie Honig points out, in her important book, Democracy and the Foreigner (2001), that the way in which the USA has tackled the question of the immigrant-foreigner is deeply revealing of its own enduring forms of nationalism. Canada, for instance, is as much of a new nation, as dependent on inflows of people from the old world, with immi-grant quotas as large or larger. Immiimmi-grants and the idea of open borders or a melting pot do not form a significant part of Canadian national self-fashioning, however, although it is arguably a liberal polity.To take another example, about 20 percent of people living in France have at least one parent or grandparent of immigrant origin.

If great-grandparents and foreign-born are included, the total is nearly one-third of the population of France. But certainly in relation to the USA, immigration plays little part in French national identity, quite the contrary.To take one example, while Ellis Island has become a national monument, the place where immigrants in the nineteenth century used to arrive in France has been razed (Noiriel 1995). (French openness to immigrants, to the extent it exists, perhaps works more through more cultural registers of Frenchness, e.g. language acquisition and use.)

In the USA today, census estimates of foreign-born residents as a fraction of the US population show that from a high of 14.7 percent in 1910, the figure declined steadily over the century, reaching 4.8 percent by 1970. Since then, the figure has climbed steeply, and is now 32.5 million as of March 2002, or 11.5 percent of the population. Over half of these are Latin American; Europe accounts for 14 percent and ‘Asia’ for 25.5 percent (United States Bureau of Census 1994, 2002). For the bulk of the twentieth century, therefore, first-generation immigrants have actually been relatively scarce, as a result of anti-immigrant legislation.⁴I suggest that in fact it is not the objective presence of immigrants that leads the USA to include them so prominently in its national mythology. Rather it reflects a specific way in which national identity is expressed in the USA.The centrality of the immigrant mirrors the extent to which the normative view of US society is one that emphasizes voluntarism and rational consent, rather than the historical events it has experienced. More precisely, rational consent itself is seen to be the dominant historical force, although of course there are other aspects of national history, including slavery, territorial expansion, wars of conquest, and, lately, superpower status, which complicate an emphasis on the acceptance of immigrants as exemplary of US values.⁵

The Puritan founding of the USA is often described as an act of immigrants, but their Puritanism was arguably more important than their immigrant identity at that time; their sense of religious mission, and their divinely sanctioned purpose of founding a new Israel, defined their actions to a much greater extent.

These original European immigrants, moreover, assumed privileges before they were granted rights, and this unauthorized act informed the political philosophy underpinning the founding of the USA: the Puritans did not seek the permission of the Crown before settling in the New World; that came a few decades later, with Sir Walter Ralegh’s charter to settle in Virginia.

Honig argues that there are three ways in which the ‘foreigner as immigrant’

functions in the USA as mechanisms for restoring vitality to the nation, and returning it to its founding principles, as it were. Immigrants may be seen as hard-working, frugal, still unspoiled by US affluence, and bringing a kind of yeoman spirit to an age when self-sacrifice has become rare – this might be seen as a kind of neo-Protestant ethic, rejuvenating the tired spirit of US capitalism.

Second, the foreigner may be seen as a bulwark against the dissolution of family and community relationships, bringing, as he or she tends to, relatively large kin networks and older ideas about solidarity and belonging – and thus reduce the alienating impact of mobile capital, with its tendency to take jobs away from localities, and destroy existing communities. The more patriarchal character of immigrant cultures is seen to provide anchorage for a more wholesome and conservative value system.

Finally, liberal theorists see the consent proffered by immigrants as renewing the meaning of their own consent to US democracy. Here we have a vision of the polity at work that is informed by a republican view of politics, where, unless the willed consent and participation of citizens is rendered meaningful, democracy turns into an empty ritual, and at worst into despotism. Since in a large institu-tionalized polity, this is not possible, immigrant participation in society becomes the compensation for what otherwise cannot happen – we can say that the problem of consent is displaced onto foreigners and their mode of acceptance of/assimilation into the USA. Rendering foreigners into exemplary Americans puts a burden on them that they never bargained for, of course.They are required to enact the proof of civic responsibility from which ordinary Americans tend to be exonerated.This, at any rate, is the risk faced by such a model of national iden-tity, which requires the immigrant foreigner to confirm the truth of national myths. In effect, when immigrants are good, they’re very good, but when they’re bad, they’re better – better, that is, as a way of affirming the boundaries of US culture. The condition of the dominant society’s interaction with immigrants is that the latter are a magic mirror, turning the image of the USA into a flattering picture. Should such a reflection fail to appear, it is not reality but the reflecting surface itself, the immigrant, who is deemed to be at fault.

Immigrants are expected to work hard and mind their own business, and show themselves to be models of civic and communitarian virtue in this way. But when

Immigrants are expected to work hard and mind their own business, and show themselves to be models of civic and communitarian virtue in this way. But when