Jon E Fox

Defining nations in Asia and Europe : A comparative analysis of ethnic return migration policy

We argue that regional comparison of East Asian and European ethnic return migration policy offers important new perspectives on nationhood, nondiscrimination norms, and trans-nationality. We find that despite international nondiscrimination norms, preferential ethnic return policy is common in both regions. These policies at least implicitly define the nation as existing across borders. However, there are significant regional differences. East Asian states use co-ethnic preferences instrumentally for economic goals and also offer preferential treatment of co-ethnic foreign investors. European states offer preferences to coethnics to protect these populations or express symbolic ties, sometimes at great expense. Thus, in Europe the state has an obligation to assist coethnics abroad, but in Asia, foreign coethnics assist the state.

Consuming the nation: holidays, sports, and the production of collective belonging

Abstract The purpose of this article is to explain how Romanian and Hungarian university students in the ethnically mixed town of Cluj, Romania, experience and constitute collective national belonging at national holiday commemorations and international football competitions. Holidays and sports are important venues for the propagation of national, and sometimes nationalist, sensitivities. But neither the resurgence of nationalist politics in post-communist east Europe nor the nationalist inclinations of past generations of university students guarantee that the current generation will experience them – or themselves – in the same national terms. While much has been written about the production of holiday and sporting events, less has been said about the creative ways in which their audiences consume them. My aim in this study is to shift attention to the university students themselves and the modalities through which they constitute (and subvert) national cohesion through participation in (and avoidance of) holiday and sporting events.

The uses of racism: whitewashing new Europeans in the UK

Abstract In many respects, recent East European migrants in the UK look like past migrants to the UK: they left poorer parts of the world in search of work and the better life in the UK. But in other respects, they look different: they are white. Their putative whiteness, however, has not exempted them from the effects of racism. But while there is growing evidence of how they have been targets of racism, less attention has been focused on how they are also perpetrators of racism. The purpose of this paper is to compare the ways Hungarians and Romanians wield ‘race’ to assert and defend the relatively privileged position their putative whiteness affords them in the UKs segmented labour market. I argue that these migrants mark, evaluate and rank difference in racialized ways to secure both social-psychological and material benefits.

Of colours and scales

Professor Banton’s headlining contribution to this symposium is further evidence of his tireless devotion to pushing the bounds of our thinking, of his thinking, on questions related to racism. Like all his work on the topic, the current article displays an erudite knowledge of the ways in which ‘race’ and its cognates operate in a dizzying array of historical and geographical coordinates. But it is not his reading of the empirical record with which I would like (or frankly be able) to take issue. Rather, my interest in this brief reply is in the more general sociological lessons we are meant to take away from Professor Banton’s analysis. Those lessons concern how we as social scientists should undertake our analysis of ‘race’ and associated phenomena. Professor Banton warns that the use of certain analytical tools risks blurring our sociological vision. The tools in question are ‘races’ and lines; Professor Banton’s new and improved replacements for them are colours and scales. The problem is that ‘races’ and lines, whilst in Du Bois’ day perhaps apt for describing a particular social reality, are too blunt for capturing the infinite variation we find in the social world. In their stead, Professor Banton would have us trade in a line for a scale and give us some colour to replace ‘races’. His argument is mainly empirical (or ‘political’ as he puts it): a colour scale provides a better description of the variation we find in the world. His colour scale is thus his explanandum: it is the thing in the world we want to analyse, understand, explain. I take no issue with this: indeed, Professor Banton’s marshalling of the evidence in this regard is both impressive and persuasive. The problem in my view is that Professor Banton’s colour scale repeatedly makes appearances on the explanans side of his equation, not as mere description of an empirical reality, the thing to be explained, but as the new and improved sociological tool to do that explaining. Sometimes this move seems inadvertent; in other places, though, Professor Banton would appear to be embracing a colour scale as our ‘primary form of differentiation’ ‘for sociological analysis’ (Banton 2011). His colour Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 35 No. 7 July 2012 pp. 1151 1156