In the last two decades, under the impact of increasing international integration and two oil shocks, the developed world has suffered broad structural changes in its economy. Since 1973, the average Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) annual growth rate, which had fluctuated around 5 percent in the 1960s, has dropped to 2.6 percent. Such a sluggish economic performance has been accompanied by different – and to some extent opposite – phenomena in each advanced nation. In continental Europe, which has a relatively regulated labor market and extensive social policies, the private sector has created few jobs in the last twenty years and the unemployment rate has jumped from less than 3 percent before 1973 to over 10 percent in the mid-1990s. By contrast, in the United States and, to some extent, in the United Kingdom, which have substantially lower levels of labor and welfare protection, employment creation has soared. Yet, unfortunately, they have had to pay a high price for their economic dynamism: median wages have declined and the income distribution has widened – in fact reversing a secular trend that started at the end of World War II.

The economic changes of the last two decades have, in turn, stirred up public life and galvanized the political debate within industrial democracies, hastening the alternation in power of different parties and encouraging experimentation with opposing economic policies in many advanced countries.

The same economic shocks of the 1970s that propelled the spectacular electoral victories of Socialist parties in Southern Europe led to a generalized shift to the Right among Northern European and American voters. The American Democratic Party suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands of a resurgent Republican Party in 1980. Socialists were displaced by a coalition of Christian Democrats and Liberals in Belgium in 1981 and in the Netherlands and Germany in 1982. In Scandinavia the traditional hegemony of social democracy in both ideas and votes started to unravel for the first time in decades. Yet the most severe defeat of the Left took place in Britain. In May 1979 the strongest turnaround of public opinion since 1945 returned the Conservative Party to office. Helped by an impressive lead over a split Labour Party, the Tory Party would enjoy a comfortable parliamentary majority for the following decade and a half.

The prolonged British Tory government makes it possible to examine the systematic implementation of a conservative economic strategy, providing therefore a pointed contrast with the Spanish Socialist experience. After a long period in search of “true Conservative solutions” (Behrens 1980) to the declining British economy, which included the failed reformist attempt under Heath in the early 1970s, by the late 1970s the Conservative leadership was definitely committed to effecting a clean break with the postwar consensus built around the active involvement of the state in the economy.

Our inquiry into the sources of economic policymaking in the advanced world has pinpointed a tight relationship between the governing partisan coalition and the selection of particular structural economic strategies. As shown by both the statistical evidence of Chapters 3 and 4 and the historical examination of Britain and Spain in the 1980s, conservative governments cut taxes, slash public investment programs, sell most public businesses, and revamp the labor market to increase the profitability of capital and to induce the unemployed to actively search for jobs. Socialist cabinets, instead, raise tax rates on high-income brackets and boost public spending on infrastructure and human capital in order to ease the transition from an unskilled population profile to a well-educated workforce without having to lower the social wage.

Such a powerful link between economic policies and partisan politics has led us inevitably to explore the electoral motives that guide the behavior of parties and the electoral dynamics behind the development of each economic strategy. Accordingly, the book has moved beyond its initial assumption that parties adopt different economic policies due to the redistributive consequences they have on clear-cut electoral constituencies. This has been done in a theoretical manner in Chapter 2 and then, mostly in empirical terms, through an analysis of the Spanish and British experiences. As discussed in this chapter, the result has been a more elaborate and complex set of arguments about the electoral dimensions of economic policymaking, and hence about the actual interaction of politics and economics.

The Sicilian thesis

In late January 1990, during the celebration of Carnival in Florence, about forty youths, masked and armed and calling themselves “avengers,” beat several North Africans and a Slav. Chanting “get the Moroccan” and “sporchi spacciatori, tunisini di merda” (“dirty dealers, shitty Tunisians”), they chased immigrants, destroyed property, and clashed with police (La Repubblica, 1 March 1990). This brutal expedition to “clean up the city” was not an isolated incident. A week earlier, merchants in the historic center of Florence had sponsored a march to gain public support for their objections to the presence of unlicensed immigrant street vendors. Posters warned ominously of giustizieri della notte (“avengers of the night”) (La Repubblica, 1 March 1990). The neo-fascist party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI), joined the march and led the chants of “rimandiamoli a casa” (“let's send them home”) and “facciamo la giustizia da soli” (“let's take justice into our own hands”) (La Repubblica, 21 February 1990). The party's poster, depicting hands ripping apart a map of Florence, was plastered throughout the city. Although the party claimed the hands represented corruption, to observers they appeared significantly dark skinned.

From the vantage point of Palermo, these events, well publicized in the national media, prompted one to question why anti-immigrant violence and political mobilization had exploded in the prosperous north while the question of razzismo had remained muted in the impoverished south. Sicilians from all walks of life with whom I spoke tended to view the Florence episode – and similar ones to follow in other northern areas–as evidence of pervasive northern intolerance.

The question of working-class racism

This chapter examines the form, content, and extent of racism and other reactions towards Africans and Asians among working Palermitans. Observers agree that, of all groups, European workers reveal the most hostility towards immigrants (Balibar 1991c, 1991e; Castles and Kosack 1985; Husbands 1983; Reeves 1983; Van Dijk 1987; Wieviorka 1992). Trade union representatives, for example, regularly find themselves caught between their aspirations to international solidarity of labor and the protectionist and nationalist demands of their indigenous members (Castles 1984; Grillo 1985). Yet little direct research on the problem has been carried out because most scholars, concentrating on the benefits to capitalists of a racially divided labor force, have too often reduced race to class and overlooked or dismissed the possiblity of racism from below (Roediger 1991: 6–11). However, the few studies to have investigated the ways in which class shapes views on immigrants and essentialist ideologies suggest valuable lines of inquiry.

In their study of a London neighborhood, Annie Phizacklea and Robert Miles (1979, 1980) argue that “working-class racism” derives not so much from adherence to ideologies of racial inequality as from the daily experience of competing with immigrants for jobs and public housing. For the English workers, the visible “coloureds” thus appear as the cause of what are in fact broader trends of industrial decline and rising unemployment. This “racist explanation for material disadvantage and decline,” it is important to note, “is only one of a number of explanations which are often as vague and inconsistent as the former” (Phizacklea and Miles 1980: 176).

The question of bourgeois racism

In this chapter I again address the question of class variation with regard to European reactions to immigrants, this time by discussing bourgeois interactions with and interpretations of African and Asian immigrants in Palermo. This contrast with working-class views: (1) permits a disaggregation of public attitudes otherwise seen as homogeneous; (2) points to the class bases of divergent views and actions; and (3) reveals different capacities for public discourse and political action. The findings show, in fact, highly contrastive and class-specific views on immigration, racism, and anti-racism. Against the often inconsistent, locally informed, ambivalent, and stubbornly pessimistic working-class views, bourgeois Palermitans espouse a sophisticated pro-immigrant, anti-racist position, grounded in universalist ideologies.

I explain these divergent views on immigration with reference to broad differences in class experience and consciousness. Tenuous security and class self-hatred on the one hand, and empathy born of shared poverty and emigration on the other, structure working-class ambivalence. By contrast, the unhesitating enthusiasm of the bourgeois high-school and university students for paradigms favorable to immigrant rights and recognition stems from the equanimity born of a relatively secure class position, knowledge of generally accepted views on race transmitted through higher education, membership of self-styled progressive circles in a national political culture dominated by the rhetoric of anti-racism, and aspects of local culture and history deemed pertinent to these paradigms. As regards the form of these divergent views, little education and the lack of access to influential public discourse undermine the consistency of working people's opinions. Among the high-school and university students, by contrast, higher education, familiarity with paradigmatic interpretations of immigration, in particular, and political discourse, in general, all contribute to the consistency and sophistication of expression.

Studies of postwar immigration reveal much about the causes and consequences of population movement for European societies, economies, and polities, and poignantly describe the often arduous life of the immigrants themselves. All but absent from this substantial body of research, however, is a concern with everyday European responses to immigrants. A similar lacuna prevails in many studies of race in the United States, and for similar reasons. From the late 1960s, the shift in focus from the “prejudice” of individual whites to the broader framework of “institutional” or “structural” racism generated powerful insights into the nature of inequality at the same time as, in important ways, it dismissed the questions of white racism, ambivalence, and anti-racism (Miles 1989: 50–6). Thus critical, often Marxian, analyses of race tend to attribute racism to systems, and ultimately to the elites who are thought to benefit from a divided workforce, and to overlook the actions of white workers in shaping their racial identity and protecting their own privileges. As a result, too many concerned scholars on both sides of the Atlantic take for granted how whites think about and act with regard to race and immigration, how they give or do not give political expression to notions of difference and similarity, and how class, culture, and gender shape views and practices. This oversight has obscured our understanding of the role of power, ideology, and everyday experience in contemporary societies.

Questions

Italy, long a country of emigration, has become a country of immigration in the past two decades with the arrival of nearly one million Africans, Asians, and others. This transformation has surprised politicians and citizens, who had come to regard emigration as part of Italian life. This change is particularly striking in the southern region of Sicily. For most of the last 100 years, oppression and poverty have generated waves of emigration from Sicily, first overseas and later, in the postwar period, to the Italian north and to western Europe. For much of this century, one out of every eight Italian emigrants was a Sicilian; and in the decade 1951–61 alone nearly 400,000 Sicilians left home (Renda 1989: 122–3; 18). From Brooklyn to Toronto, from Milan to Frankfurt, Sicilians have built bridges, dug tunnels, and constructed office buildings; and, as even the casual tourist knows, they have brought their shops, bakeries, and restaurants to far-flung Little Italies.

The 1970s witnessed a profound change in migratory patterns as many Sicilians returned and newcomers arrived. Among the first to arrive were Tunisians, who toiled in the fields, vineyards, and fisheries. Cape Verdian, Mauritian, and Filipino women served as domestics in homes of the urban rich. In the course of the 1980s some two dozen other nationalities, mostly from Africa and Asia, joined them, swelling the ranks of immigrants to about 15,000 in Palermo alone (Giornale di Sicilia, 6 September 1990).