Cultural Geography

made too simple. It is true, they suggest, that ‘we

do not have camps and our police ... are not

omnipresent political police’, but nothing guaran-

tees that our democracy ‘is not in the process of

secreting something else, a new form of totalitari-

anism’(1997: 128).

We can suggest here that the visibility of the

structures of democracy can conceal totalitarian

undercurrents and at the same time this visibility

offers a legitimation to those who want to defend

the idea of the existence of an open and demo-

cratic polity as a continuing reality. In the 1950s,

for example, the House UnAmerican Activities

Committee launched a witch-hunt against a wide

range of citizens who were accused of not being

faithful to ‘American values’. This was a totali-

tarian initiative that unfolded within the structures

of a democracy, being intimately interwoven

with the international situation of superpower

rivalry. The inside and outside were intertwined

and a culture of containment permeated the

arenas of both domestic politics and foreign

policy. Interventions and invasiveness abroad

were paralleled by the policing of difference and

dissent at home. Here, a post-colonial perspec-

tive would encourage us to foreground not only

the ‘totalitarian’ within the ‘democratic’ but also

the imbrication of the internal and the external

and the impossibility of understanding any

western power as a self-contained entity.

Another example of the significant imbrica-

tion of the inside and the outside as well as the

blindness that exists concerning the growth of

counter-democratic trends can be illustrated

from one of Fiske’s (1998) examples – that

of ‘non-racist racism’. This, he contends, is a

racism that has been developed by white-

powered nations that avow themselves to be non-

racist. In the United States this racism is recoded

into ostensibly race-neutral discourses, such as

those of economics, law, education and housing.

Each of the social domains within which these

discourses operate has racially differentiated

effects for which the causes can always be

made to appear non-racial. Indeed racism is illegal

in most domains of US public life and many

whites, Fiske goes on, profess to believe that

racism is now a non-problem. Conversely, in

black America there is a widespread knowledge

that racism is waxing not waning, and clearly

economic and educational indicators show that

the gaps between white and black Americans are

increasing not narrowing. This view finds an

echo in Rae’s (1999) recent study, where he

points to the development of a ‘segmental demo-

cracy’ with decisions made by and for relatively

homogeneous populations in specific areas, and the

emergence of sophisticated forms of discrimination

in real-estate markets supplanting more vulgar

practices made unlawful by the civil rights

legislation of the 1960s.

The trends towards a diminishing of the open-

ness required by democracy if it is to flourish are

reflected in a variety of ways. Western democra-

cies are far from being tyrannies, but the notion

of a ‘totalitarian democracy’ does capture a dis-

turbing trend whereby the institutions and formal

arrangements of democratic rule may well remain

in place but the participatory and empowering

substance of those arrangements and mecha-

nisms is being insidiously degraded. A recrudes-

cence of racism, manifested in increased attacks

on asylum seekers and ethnic minorities, and

the attempts by democratically elected leaders

to nurture a monoculture of political debate,

supported by sections of the print media that

consistently express xenophobic sentiments,

both undermine key values on which the democ-

ratic process rests. A post-colonial view might

seek to draw out the connections between the

western undermining of democratic experiments

abroad and the chilling of plurality and critical

thought at home. There is too, especially visible

in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, a resur-

facing within the west of imperial sentiment and

a reassertion of occidental supremacy. Both posi-

tions need to be continually confronted.

ON THE POLITICS OF

‘THE BEYOND’

The title of this chapter invokes the need to go

beyond Euro-Americanism, and suggests the

potential relevance of a post-colonial perspec-

tive. The analytical scope clearly outstrips the

confines of any chapter. All I have been able to

do in these few pages is to alert the reader to

some of the problems and challenges that we are

all going to have to deal with in the future, and

with far more rigour and attention.

One of the advantages of a crisis can be that

the contours of debate are starkly clarified.

Within the realm of the social sciences, Francis

Fukuyama (2001), in a short intervention entitled

‘The West has Won’, gives expression to a virulent

form of arrogance and ignorance that not only

places the west at the heart of world civilizations,

past, present and future, but at the same time

denigrates the non-west and specifically Islamic

civilization in a way that replicates the Hegel of

the mid nineteenth century. In the domain of poli-

tics,the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi

asserts the supposed superiority of western

civilization over all others and especially the

BEYOND EURO-AMERICANISM 429

3029-ch22.qxd 03-10-02 11:01 AM Page 429