Gavan Titley

The crisis of ‘multiculturalism’ in Europe: Mediated minarets, intolerable subjects:

During the last decade, European countries have declared a ‘crisis’ of multiculturalism. This crisis has gained significant political traction, despite the empirical absence of a failed experiment with multiculturalism. This introduction focuses on the narrative of multicultural backlash, which purports that ‘parallel societies’ and ‘intolerable subjects’ and practices have been allowed to flourish within European societies. Beyond particular contexts, the problem of intolerable subjects is seen as a shared European challenge, requiring disintegrated migrants and Muslim populations to display loyalty, adopt ‘our’ values, and prove the legitimacy of their belonging. This introduction critiques multicultural backlash, less as a rejection of piecemeal multicultural policies than as a denial of lived multiculture. This is developed through an examination of racism in a post-racial era, and by analysing the ways in which integrationist projects further embed culturalist ontology.

Ideology critique: the challenge for media studies

Taking our bearings from Stuart Hall’s essay from 1982, ‘The rediscovery of “ideology”: return of the repressed in media studies’, we argue in this discussion piece for the need to pick up the tools of ideology critique once again. Quite simply, the contemporary moment where accelerating inequality is masked by blame of the poor and of migrants demands it. The case is made first through a critique of ideological responses to the economic crisis after 2008. Then in the final section we examine advocacy of ‘social mobility’ in the public sphere, an ideological project if ever there was one.

Budgetjam! A communications intervention in the political-economic crisis in Ireland

This essay reflects on a communications intervention organized immediately following the ‘bailout’ provided to Ireland by the troika of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB), and preceding the implementation of an ‘austerity’ budget designed to further the transfer of banking debt to the sovereign. Reacting to the steadfast official narrative that ‘there is no alternative’, and the general failure of mainstream journalism to question the framing of the ‘bailout’, a network of political and community activists, journalists and academics experimented with ways of challenging the dominant framing of the crisis.

THEY CALLED A WAR, AND SOMEONE CAME:

Abstract This article examines the intensely mediated debate on the relationship between ideological affinity and political implication that followed the documenting of the ‘citational ecology’ of Breivik’s 2083 compendium. Focusing on the recurring trope of war in counter-jihad blog posts and mainstream media comment, it argues that the invocation of ‘war’ is important beyond limiting debates on incitement and ‘moral responsibility’. Following Butler (2009), it examines this ‘frame of war’ and its poetics as the condition of counter-jihad networks and as the licence for mainstream polemics on the ‘failed experiment’ of multiculturalism.

Mourning and longing: Media studies learning to let go of liberal democracy

In her essay ‘Neoliberalism and the end of liberal democracy’, Wendy Brown suggests that critical political theory needs to ‘mourn liberal democracy’ in order to develop a transformative vision of ‘the good’. The problem, as Brown outlines it, is not only that – to varying extents and in different scales across democratic states – market rationality has hollowed out representative structures and processes and organizes social life but also that ‘basic principles and institutions of democracy are becoming nothing other than ideological shells’ that nevertheless legitimate neoliberal governmentality. Brown’s concept of mourning has implications for Media Studies’ constitutive focus on publicness and political participation within the democratic nation-state. This article considers Brown’s critique in relation to the tendency in Media Studies to admit the unachievable idealism of certain ideas – particularly in relation to the public sphere and pluralism – while continuing to use them as guiding normative standards and values. The article questions how such normative ideals can provide guidance where not only the political and institutional imaginary that underpins them has changed, perhaps irrevocably, but where the continued flagging of these ideas may be implicated in the kind of ideological camouflage Brown identifies.

After the end of multiculturalism: Public service media and integrationist imaginaries for the governance of difference

This article assesses the public service media (PSM) ‘turn to diversity’ in several European contexts and examines the ways in which this emerges from a rejection of multiculturalism that is at once politically sustained and analytically inchoate. It approaches PSM as national institutions conditioned to mediate coherent images of society. In contemporary European societies, this positions PSM in a field in which integrationist imaginaries of the nation are insistent, but under conditions of social complexity, which render homogeneous visions of the nation difficult to mediate. In this context, diversity has developed as a framework for mediating, and being held to mediate, lived multiculture. However, recent research suggests that this shift to diversity both depoliticizes the ‘politics of difference’ and may also further the prevalent integration politics currently in the ascendant in Western Europe.

The “War on Terror” and Non-alignment

Against such an enemy, there can be no neutrality. —President George W. Bush, March 11, 2002 Two European Union countries—Ireland and Finland—could never be called “enemies” of America. Nevertheless, they remain, for historical and pragmatic reasons, outside any formal military alliances. Because of this non-alignment, they have been pressured since 9/11 to state exactly where they stand in relation to the U.S. and its “War on Terror.” Both are members of NATOs Partnership for Peace (PfP) initiative, and their positions are closer to what James Skelly has described as “impartial” rather than isolationist neutrality. Finnish soldiers have served with distinction in peace-keeping operations and their diplomats have been seen as honest brokers in Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. Irish soldiers have helped to keep the fragile peace in Lebanon and East Timor, and Ireland has provided the UN with major.gures such as Mary Robinson and Dennis Halliday. The importance the citizens of these countries has given to the role of the UN in world affairs was amply illustrated in the anti-war demonstrations of early 2003, when the light-blue flags of the UN were much in evidence in Helsinki and Dublin. Some parties claim that non-alignment remains so popular with the Finnish and Irish people because they fail to understand contemporary geopolitics. Yet, it is more than coincidence that both countries witnessed at close hand some of the hypocrisy at work in the War on Terror. Finland borders Russia, whose government has used much of the Bush rhetoric to justify a mutually destructive campaign in Chechnya. The Irish, similarly, have observed for decades the way the British government has conducted a “dirty war” in Northern Ireland. With this experience comes a realization that terror, whatever form it takes, can seldom be beaten by violence. By contrast, and perhaps by necessity, the governments of these countries have obfuscated the issue in order to be all things to all people. The high-wire act that both have performed in order to convince their electorates that their non-aligned status is intact, and yet at the same time keep in Bush’s good books, has produced great elasticity in definitions of neutrality.

Getting integration right? Media transnationalism and domopolitics in Ireland

Abstract This article examines the transnational media environments and experiences of Nigerian and Chinese nationals living in Ireland. It theorizes empirical research in the context of the mode of integration governance developed in the Republic of Ireland during a period of significant in-migration. Building on a theory of domopolitics, it suggests that Irelands short-lived integration regime deployed culture and interculturalism as resources for the self-governing integration of all foreign nationals, while developing a system of civic stratification designed to limit claims to citizenship and social and economic rights. It examines the concomitant development of public service media policies in this context. Drawing on recent discussions of contrapuntal media readings, the article argues that transnational media experience refracts the lived tensions inherent in the disjuncture between the possibilities of cultural participation and the constraints of socio-political containment.

On Are we all postracial yet

ABSTRACT If the postracial is a coherent formation, it is produced not by ideological lock-step but by distributed affinities and relations in a transnational space of interconnection and exchange. The neoliberal erasure of ‘ … the structural conditions of racial reproduction and racist articulation’ (34) and the clouding of the historicity of racisms produces postraciality as ‘the illusion that the dream of the nonracial has already been realized’ (180). This illusion is familiar in writing on the postracial that focuses on the denial – be it through the averted gaze of ‘color-blindness’, or the official state prohibition of racism, or the triumphalism of strategic declarations of the ‘end of racism’ – of enduring racialized inequality. Goldberg’s advance is to explore how the illusion has become increasingly weaponized; that far from signalling the end of race, it represents an emergent ‘neo-raciality, racism’s extension if not resurrection’ (24).

After the ‘Failed Experiment’: Intercultural Learning in a Multicultural Crisis

In a speech at an international security conference in Munich in February 2011, the British Prime Minister David Cameron declared that ‘multiculturalism’ had failed. In the place of what he characterised as ‘passive tolerance’, something called ‘muscular liberalism’ is instead required, whereby a genuinely liberal country discourages separate cultures from living ‘parallel lives’, and instead ‘believes in certain values and promotes them’. For British Prime Ministers, Munich will always have a special resonance, but the echo sought by Cameron was very recent. In October 2010, and in a context where the publication of Thilo Sarrazin’s Deutschland schafft sich ab had stoked a public firestorm concerning racism in Germany, Angela Merkel informed a youth conference of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party that multiculturalism had failed in Germany. Developing the point, she argued that ‘…the approach (to build) a multicultural (society) and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other … has failed, utterly failed’.