Introduction

Following the resignation of Theresa May, who had repeatedly failed to get parliamentary agreement on Brexit, Boris Johnson's first premiership began on 24 July 2019, with a promise to get Brexit done, deal or no deal. In order to do this, he was to call a snap General Election, which took place on 12 December 2019 and which he won with a landslide (see Chapter 4). Once Brexit was achieved on 31 January 2020, economic policy making was largely driven by COVID-19, the first documented cases of which were also in January 2020. The gravity of its economic consequences saw many countries, as in the aftermath of the financial crisis 2007– 2008 (see Chapter 6), adopt Keynesian-style policies, with governments prioritizing employment and seeking to maintain a baseline of economic performance, supported by the state provision of loans to private firms, corporate equity ownership with high levels of welfare spending. In the case of the UK, the priority after the onset of COVID-19 was for the state to assume responsibility for guaranteeing continued private sector activity and to utilize to the full the battered Welfare State and other public services, such as private businesses publicly financed, to try to cope with the pandemic and to forestall the possibility of complete societal breakdown. Daniel Béland et al refer to this form of capitalist crisis management (see Chapter 2) as ‘emergency Keynesianism’. Such temporary changes in economic paradigms as well as the return of neoliberal economics and, in the case of Britain, to severe and callous austerity, need continuous public legitimation to curtail challenges from alternative economic ideas, socialism being an obvious example.

Use of endnotes

I would like, at the outset to make a few comments about my use of endnotes. As well as indicating, where applicable, the source of the points I am making (the full references appear in a list at the end of the book), the endnotes can also contain further details and/or suggestions for additional reading. These include recommendations for the development of a deeper understanding of aspects of the theories or issues being discussed in the text, or other related readings. While these may be required reading for students or a resource for those researching the field, for the general reader interested in the main themes and topics of the book, these can be understood, without reading all, or indeed any, of the endnotes.

Why a book on racism, the hostile environment, austerity and the Tory Party?

Racism has been endemic in the Tory Party since the 19th century, whereas the hostile environment, a major new policy initiative in the Tory racism arsenal, is much more recent, having been launched in 2012, though in preparation before that. Austerity has a much longer history, with its intellectual origins dating back to the 17th century, but, in the modern era, it became official Tory policy in 2010. While hostility and austerity are distinguished in the book for analytical reasons, they are not mutually exclusive. First, hostility, as in the ‘hostile environment’, is also austere; and austerity is itself inherently hostile. Second, ‘migrants’ are on the receiving end of austerity as well as hostility; and the working class are treated with hostility as well as subject to austerity.

On a grey day in mid-April 2022, the charismatic prime minister of Finland, Sanna Marin, held an outdoor press conference with her Swedish colleague Magdalena Andersson during an official visit to Stockholm (Olsson 2022). Just as the traditional geostrategic positions of Sweden and Finland provide a striking contrast, so too did the visual appearance of the two leaders: a young Marin with black polo shirt and cool leather jacket versus a more mature Andersson in wool coat and scarf. As a symptom of the current drama over European security, all the questions from the press corps were about NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization). While it would take a few more weeks for the two countries to decide officially on applying for NATO membership, the press conference was a symbolic event for the joint strategic process of abandoning their long-standing records of military non-alignment. After this process, things would never be the same again. This book is about this interlinked route and its consequences and future implications for these two countries as well as for NATO.

NATO, at least in its own words, is often regarded as the most successful military alliance in world history. In addition to its proven record of deterring military attacks on the territories of its member states, its enlargement from 12 members in 1949, when it was founded, to an alliance of 32 members in 2024, when it turned 75 years old, is seen as a strong sign of its success (see, for example, Rynning 2024).

Introduction

Racism played a central role in the UK's decision to vote to leave the European Union (EU) on 23 June 2016. Following the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum in which a narrow majority of 52 per cent voted to leave the EU, a number of academics have engaged critically with the ways in which racism got bundled up with its outcome. Sivanandan (cited in Burnett, 2017: 85) claimed that ‘whatever else Brexit means or does not mean, it certainly means racism’, and Virdee and McGeever (2017: 1802) in their now-seminal paper on racism within the Brexit debate articulated that ‘Brexit and its aftermath have been overdetermined by racism, including racist violence’. This literature has focused on the ways in which racism became mobilized through the rise of racial violence and abuse in the aftermath of the referendum and how discourses of empire 2.0 and historical legacies of British colonialism fed into the ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ campaigns. However, within these racist registers of the Brexit debate, there is scope to see how Zygmunt Bauman's (2000) liquid metaphor can be used to flesh out new, contemporary understandings of how racism was deployed and mobilized during and after the UK's vote to leave the EU. Notions of sedimentary colonial legacies, viscosities, glaciation, soaking and filtering all play a role in the way in which Leavers and Remainers positioned their case to leave or remain in the EU. The praxes of liquidity also become integral to understanding the wider social and political condition that led to the EU referendum.

In this chapter, we explore how liquid racism operates as a concept in specific ways that contributed to the racialized discourses and set of circumstances that led to, and occurred during, the EU referendum.

Introduction and theoretical priors

This volume sets up a dialogue among social scientists from different traditions, each of which employs different frameworks to analyze the connections among states, private financial actors, and global money and credit markets. This introduction clarifies how this chapter fits within this dialogue. Most of the included authors implicitly or explicitly adhere to the theoretical priors of one of three traditions: international financial subordination, as most clearly articulated in by Ilias Alami and the concluding chapter by Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven; international financial statecraft, as in this chapter; or political and economic survival constraints for the state, as in Anush Kapadia and Fathimath Musthaq's discussion of India. One way to frame the dialogue is to highlight differences in their underlying assumptions. To begin, note that ‘the state’ has two distinct meanings for included authors. The first definition is incumbent national political leaders (senior policy makers) plus the permanent central government administrative bureaucracy. Thus, one might investigate the degree of independence of ‘the state’ from private financial capital. The second meaning is independent country, as in ‘the structure of the interstate system is determined by the Chapter 2 distribution of capabilities among its units, who are sovereign states’.

International financial subordination (IFS) researchers begin from the thesis that both international markets and legally sovereign countries are penetrated by, and often subordinated to, the wishes of private financial actors, as the latter are driven to expand their control and their profits. National political incumbents (representatives of ‘the state’) in each industrial core country mainly interact with private capital based within their own borders, with senior politicians acting on behalf of private financiers, whether consciously or not.

Introduction

In this chapter, we propose to understand financial statecraft as the use of monetary, financial, and regulatory levers to reduce a state's survival constraint, which necessarily has both domestic and international manifestations. The state's capacity to relax its domestic survival constraint rests on a set of social compacts or political settlements between the state and society. For India, we identify the evolving bargain between the state and the three dominant classes – big business, rich farmers, professional class – () as central to explaining India's financial statecraft. This political settlement yields a national economy with particular weaknesses, namely a heavy reliance on the import of oil, the import-demand for capital and consumer goods (the latter particularly driven by India's aspirational salaried class which results in chronic current account deficits), and domestically bound accumulation strategies particularly in non-tradable sectors by India's big businesses, which yields a stagnant economy with little innovation and marginal exports (). Meanwhile, rich farmers continue to rely on state subsidies while taxes on urban elites are low, contributing to a structural fiscal deficit. This is compounded by a highly mobilized and largely poor electorate that makes particularistic demands that yield particularistic welfare consumables. While this initial bargain has evolved over the years – capital becoming discursively dominant, the bureaucracy relatively less autonomous, some rich farmers morphing into businesses – the net result for India's survival constraint is Bardhan, 1999Nölke et al, 2021 relatively unchanged. The signal change is on the external account, with external private debt issued by a handful of large firms substituting for external public debt helping to relax the balance of payments constraint.

This book is focused on addressing the relative overlooking of race in theories on late modernity, and utilizes three case studies – Brexit, education and road culture – to demonstrate the ways in which Zygmund Bauman's concept of liquidity can be applied to understand race relations in contemporary social theory. The case studies themselves are, of course, very different in nature, with Brexit being a historical moment, education an institutional site, and road culture a social phenomenon. However, as we will demonstrate, the liquidity of racism in contemporary society is such that it is able to permeate across these forms at the macro (Brexit), meso (education) and micro (road culture) levels. The experience of each of these cases is relational and can be felt at every level. It is important to note that the book's application of macro-/meso-/micro-scalar analyses is mostly used as a narrative framing device. For example, we look at Brexit as a macro-national and international phenomenon informed by relations between the UK and Europe, and the national public-political sphere. Similarly, we focus on education as an institution in the UK context and explore how race and racism function at the meso-level. Finally, road culture is discussed with an emphasis on the micro-level through its embodiment in the context of wider issues around social locatedness.

While the case study chapters are the key sites where the application of liquidity to race in late modernity is discussed, it is important first for us to provide an oversight of Bauman's work most relevant to this purpose.

This chapter deals with the Swedish case and discusses the main puzzles of this book: the mix of strategic and political factors driving the enlargement policy, the role played by NATO (as an organization and individual member states) and the nature of the impact of the developments in Finland. The chapter has four sections. In the first two, we briefly outline Sweden's historical relationship with NATO, during as well as after the end of the Cold War. In line with existing scholarship, we conclude that during the Cold War, Sweden had a complicated relationship based on a declared policy of neutrality in parallel with secret cooperation with NATO concerning common strategic interests on Europe's northern flank. These initial sections also make the fundamental point that Sweden was not neutral when it started its journey into the Alliance in 2022.

The next section deals, in some detail, with the Swedish application process. While the process in Finland was discussed in Chapter 3, here we show how developments in Finland had a catalytic impact on Sweden and its political establishment. Further, we investigate how the political establishment handled public opinion and what strategic considerations were on the agenda. In the final section, we discuss different explanations for the Swedish decision to seek NATO membership.

Introduction

In April 2018, Home Secretary Amber Rudd resigned after a series of revelations in The Guardian that she had inadvertently misled Parliament over her role in the unjust treatment of Windrush generation migrants. The Guardian revealed that in a leaked 2017 letter to Theresa May, Rudd had told May of her intention to increase deportations by 10 per cent – at odds with her denials that she was aware of deportation targets, but clearly in line with the hostile environment. Rudd was replaced by Sajid Javid who, presumably in a vain attempt to tone things down, referring to ‘the hostile environment’, declared, ‘I don't like the phrase hostile. So the terminology is incorrect and I think it is a phrase that is unhelpful. … It is about a compliant environment and it is right that we have a compliant environment’. The new term has understandably been largely ignored, given that ‘the hostile environment’ has established itself as a most accurate description of the state of play in the Tory Party of entrenched racism going forward: the hostile environment was here to stay. Two months after his intervention, Javid paused a range of hostile environment policies in order to stop people who have lived in the UK for more than 30 years being ‘erroneously impacted by compliant environment measures’. These included sharing data from HM Revenue and Customs, the Department for Work and Pensions, and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency with the Home Office, thus temporarily halting these combative measures that were introduced under May's watch as Home Secretary. The pause was only for three months.