Forty years after the defeat of Nazism, and twenty years after the great
wave of decolonization, how is it that racism remains a growing
phenomenon? What are the special characteristics of contemporary racism?
How can it be related to class divisions and to the contradictions of
the nation-state? And how far, in turn, does racism today compel us to
rethink the relationship between class struggles and nationalism?
This book attempts to answer these fundamental questions through a
remarkable dialogue between the French philosopher Etienne Balibar and
the American historian and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. Each brings
to the debate the fruits of over two decades of analytical work, greatly
inspired, respectively, by Louis Althusser and Fernand Braudel. Both
authors challenge the commonly held notion of racism as a continuation
of, or throwback to, the xenophobias of past societies and communities.
They analyze it instead as a social relation indissolubly tied to
present social structures--the nation-state, the division of labor, and
the division between core and periphery--which are themselves constantly
being reconstructed. Despite their productive disagreements, Balibar and
Wallerstein both emphasize the modernity of racism and the need to
understand its relation to contemporary capitalism and class struggle.
Above all, their dialogue reveals the forms of present and future social
conflict, in a world where the crisis of the nation-state is accompanied
by an alarming rise of nationalism and chauvinism.
