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Preface to the English Edition

‘Germany shocked by Cologne New Year gang assaults on women’, reported BBC News on 5 January 2016 after the assaults had taken place against women in Cologne.¹ The New York Times, for its part, declared ‘Germany on the Brink’.² These were just two of many international headlines covering the incidents in Germany’s fourth most populous city on New Year’s Eve 2015, during the festivities of which hundreds of women are thought to have been mugged and/or sexually attacked, including raped. Over the course of the following days, the ‘Night That Changed Everything’,³ as the German daily Welt am Sonntag decided to dub it, went global. All too quickly, ‘Cologne’ became an internationally recognized shorthand for the already heated debate seething at the nexus of gender, migration, religion, race, and sexuality. So, what, if anything, did change on that infamous ‘night that changed everything’? That is the question we pursue in this book.

But is it really still necessary, especially for those of us beyond Germany’s borders, four years after the event, to concern ourselves with ‘Cologne’? Is ‘Cologne’ really something people uninvested in domestic German politics should concern themselves with, readers in the Anglosphere might well ask. We think the answer is ‘yes’. As we see it, ‘Cologne’ has become a universal referent in the global spectacle that is the ‘migration crisis’, the flashpoint around which, in Kobena Mercer’s words, ‘ethnic chauvinisms, neonationalisms and numerous fundamentalisms strive to close down the symbolic boundaries of group belonging.’⁴ ‘Cologne’ is not just a cipher, then, but a caesura: it stands for the alleged failure of refugees to integrate, for the supposed collapse of multiculturalist daydreaming into a living nightmare of violence and insecurity, and for the putative erosion of ‘our’ public order by the excessive presence of those of African, Muslim or otherwise somehow ‘not German’ origin.

The stage for this ‘clash of civilizations’ (in Samuel Huntington’s model) was Cologne’s Domplatte – the space around Cologne Cathedral. And, as we hope to show, it was no coincidence that the clash occurred along the fault lines of sexuality and gender. As Michel Foucault contends in his History of Sexuality (1980), gender and sexuality should not be understood as antitheses of politics and power, but precisely as ‘dense transfer points for relations of power’.⁵ It is in no small part in relation to these two terms that humanity’s collective coexistence is presently being negotiated. Sexuality, Foucault shows, ‘is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for the greatest number of manoeuvres and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies.’⁶

As with sexuality, so with gender. Certainly, there are several other fields of experience relevant to everyday life that could lay claim to such instrumentality, such as ‘crime’, ‘violence’ and ‘terrorism’ (categories whose very diffuseness seems to make them more effective). Yet sexuality and gender seem to be especially amenable for use as a container for other, affectively charged, intensely controversial questions. They are social order issues: determining how we live alongside one another, in general, and particularly in public; which is to say, they are questions of ethical coexistence. How will – how can – we live together? How shall we accomplish this, when it comes down to it? How shall people in a pluralistic democracy speak to one another about this, including when it is necessary to really thrash things out? How do we want to speak? Who can, and who will, participate in this conversation in a globalized world shot through, whether we like it or not, with inequality, danger, precarity, religion and borders? Ultimately, these are the disquieting, difficult and fundamental questions that Cologne highlighted anew.

And these are the debates to which we – as sociologists, feminists and politically committed citizens – wished to contribute in writing this book. It seemed to us that public political discourse around the big questions of our time, post-Cologne, had become incredibly toxic: frequently (albeit not always) enacting the mere appearance of a debate. This was equally true of mainstream news features and talk shows; formal reportage and the blogosphere, vlogs, Twitter and other social media; parliamentary debates, seminar discussions, conference panels; political rallies, and posters brandished at demonstrations – all across the political spectrum. What was missing across the board, from our point of view, was and remains a certain quality of collective critical reflection that might enable a – controversial, yes, but deeply needful – series of debates about the practicalities of living alongside one another. Topics up for debate would necessarily include: the meaning of sexual freedom; relations between the sexes; bodily autonomy; the freedom to move around without constraint; freedom to love, pray, dress a certain way, and be sexually active – or not; and the right to be more than the object of public discussion, that is to say, to participate critically in public debates.

We could not agree more that what happened on the Cologne Domplatte on New Year’s Eve is not something we can dismiss with just a few pithy platitudes. None of the available cynical reactions, be it ‘nothing happened’, ‘we all know what happened – nothing special’, or ‘boys will be boys’ (i.e., men having fun will necessarily be men harassing women), are remotely appropriate responses. Of course, the popular blanket statements profiling ‘the’ Arab or Muslim man as a harasser of ‘our’ women – while pretending that such things do not happen in Germany, in the West, or within Christianity – are every bit as inappropriate. Without a doubt, sexual violence was perpetrated that night, and this represents a grave problem. At the time, it made both of us feel helpless and angry. We were angry that women, in 2016, could not move around in public space without risking molestation. We were angry that the police (as a committee of parliamentary inquiry for the North Rhine–Westphalia region later determined⁷) completely failed to predict the situation and, as a result, acted negligently. We were angry that the women who reported what was done to them to the police were not believed. But all this anger and dismay, fostered by that particular occasion, has the potential to make us forget that nothing about it was either new or rare in Germany – quite the reverse. Misogynist and often sexualized violence is part of German normality – not only against women, but also against queers, gays and lesbians, trans and intersex individuals, children and adolescents of all sexes, and structurally vulnerable people generally. Unfortunately, as international and transnational studies have shown time and again, sexual violence, misogyny and sexism are global phenomena: just think of #MeToo and #NiUnaMenos.⁸ But violence is nevertheless not an ahistorical, transcultural human disposition, nor even an anthropological constant, simply to be accepted as a fact of nature. It must always be apprehended in a context-specific manner, for its expression from place to place is far from uniform. By establishing this, we are by no means relativizing bad deeds and values: we mean it as an empirical statement, denoting a general epistemic starting point.

It would be difficult to overstate the hypocrisy of those countless German commentators who, in delivering their Cologne-related verdicts, suddenly now discovered themselves to be feminists – but only insofar as the criminals were thought to be non-German and (specifically) ‘Arab-born’. As vital and important as it is to fight sexism, and especially to struggle against sexual and gender-based violence, if that commitment becomes racist, xenophobic, or narrowly culturalist, it becomes destructive. And it is precisely that coupling, between feminism and cultural racism, that quickly became the dominant form of discourse concerning Cologne, both within Germany and internationally. Racism and culturalist stereotyping, in fact, became the condition for mainstream articulations of the problem of sexual violence. Or, to put it the other way around: sexual politics became, once more, a terrain for racist knowledge production. Openly racist and xenophobic rhetoric was now not just possible, nor even simply legitimate: it was now, seemingly, required in order to protect ‘our’ women, as part of the defence of ‘Western values’ and sexual equality.

Resistance to migration, in Germany, has always been racist insofar as it cannot be disentangled from the long history of normalizing divisions between those who belong to the national community – the Volk – and those who not only do not belong but actively threaten the community by their very presence. One particular form of racism experienced a substantial boost after the Cologne ‘sex mob’ events: feminist racism (or racist feminism). We saw the widespread co-optation of feminist arguments in the service of Europe’s border regime. We saw notions of gender- and sexuality-related emancipation, not to mention LGBTQ rights, mobilized to justify the primacy of European culture. Indeed, xenophobic, ultranationalist, and nativist movements, parties, and governments all over Europe have increasingly adopted concepts of sexual equality for their fundamentalist purposes ever since. They claim, for example, that male Muslim citizens (and non-Western male migrants generally) are incapable of respecting the rights of women and queers. It was our intense irritation about this that first initiated our thinking about Cologne.

We are not in the least interested in denying that violence was practiced that night. It remains an appalling reality in our society that victims of sexual violence are systematically disbelieved: accused of having somehow provoked or consented to what they endured, or else implied to be outright making it up. The fact that, more than four years after the events on New Year’s Eve 2015, only two people have been convicted for ‘sexual assault’, according to Cologne’s District Court, and only one for ‘groping’, does not indicate to us that there was an absence of violence. That particular tally merely indicates that charges could not be brought, because the majority of the offences reported could not be confidently assigned by name to known persons. A further aggravating factor came from the fact that, at the time, the majority of the sexual offences reported were not even punishable under German sexual criminal law. Nevertheless, we find it concerning that more than three-quarters of the original 1,200 criminal complaints were lodged against ‘Unknown’, and that, in the almost 300 proceedings initiated against named parties, only a few cases resulted in an indictment and conviction.

Superficially, at least, these figures contradict the attitude of total certitude that still characterizes the vast majority of commentaries on the ‘night that changed everything’. The sheer certainty with which civil society discussed, for instance, who was loitering outside Cologne Hauptbahnhof that night, who was the perpetrator, who the victim, what criminally prosecutable acts and violent actions took place, for what motive and why, was and remains truly remarkable. For many people – including many feminists – it remains a foregone conclusion that among the thousands of revellers who met up outside Cologne Cathedral that evening, there numbered ‘around 2,000 young men, predominantly Algerians, Moroccans, North Africans’, as Alice Schwarzer, editor of Germany’s oldest feminist magazine, EMMA, claimed once again in April 2019.⁹ Schwarzer contends, in her unbearably generalizing style, that ‘what we are dealing with’ is ‘uprooted, socially unaffiliated young men, most of them undocumented’ – a group of people who, according to Schwarzer, will ‘always cause problems’ for ‘us’ by seeking to import their violent and brutal misogynist methods (inculcated in them from childhood!) ‘into the heart of Europe’. Is this really the case? Is this a meaningful interpretation of the ‘Night in Cologne’? Our inquiry, in a sense, starts here.

At the outset, two things were painfully clear to us. First: yes, we, too, do not know what actually happened around the cathedral that night, and we, too, are deeply upset about the extent of the sexual violence. At the same time, we contend, thinking about how these acts form part of our present does not amount to a failure to take their implications seriously: quite the reverse. If we want to make sense of the relationship sexual violence holds to our present, in a context of migration, globalization and political volatility, and particularly in view of the mounting (parliamentary as well as extra-parliamentary) political successes of new authoritarian, xenophobic, racist and antisemitic tendencies, we will have to assume the relationship is much less simple than it was typically presented to be in the hegemonic discourse on Cologne.

Then what exactly is the problem of ‘Cologne’, according to us, if it is not (primarily) a global culture of everyday sexism and misogyny that makes violent excesses like this possible, indeed, inevitable? What is it, if not ‘toxic masculinity’, letting off steam in public by harassing women who are simply trying to enjoy themselves at New Year’s Eve celebrations, at carnival, football matches, military parades and beer festivals? What, if not something about the devout religiosity imputed – or, rather, naturalized as inherent – to the men involved (i.e., the perpetrators), something ingrained that means they scarcely know how to behave otherwise? How could their place of origin (supposed or actual) not be part of the problem? Our essay considers how the problem of ‘Cologne’ was defined, what exactly is being negotiated in it, and by whom.

Second, we, too, did not talk to any of the victims. It would have been irresponsible for us to try, since neither of us has journalistic training, and this is not a book based on first-hand empirical sociological research. Our methods can plausibly be criticized on that basis: indeed, they have been (in the course of the book’s German-speaking reception). In Chapter 5, via a dialogue, we reflect on these and related issues self-critically. However, we hope that our approach is one that also contributes to the task of making sexism and sexualized violence visible and legible without falling into racist reifications or objectifications.

Instead of leaving the links between things sinisterly implicit, we seek to determine: What are the concrete effects of one explanation of (or use of) sexuality compared to another? Whose discourses of naturalized – ostensibly traditional – logics of sexual violence are successfully put to work, with reference to whose violence, and how? How are notions of sexual freedom, equality between the sexes, secularism, enlightenment, emancipation, liberty and individualism themselves freighted with particular conceptions of sexuality? And how, in historic context, are these meanings sutured and shifted? Lastly, how do certain recourses to – and versions of – sexuality organize our very perception: our sensitivities, our receptivities? What politics, what judgments, are prone to emerge on that basis? The purpose of our treatise is to confront such questions. We believe they are just as relevant to a non-German readership as they are to ours, and we hope our rumination helps to clarify them. It is, indeed, urgent to grasp how the loci of gender and sexuality are functioning, in specific contexts, to draw and redraw the boundaries constitutive of social order: inside/outside, moral/amoral, vulnerable/dangerous, own/alien, us/them.

To reflect properly on Cologne is to be willing to regard social effects that might appear (from a feminist perspective) to be positive developments as profoundly ambivalent. For example: the explosive rise to prominence of the theme of sexual violence resulted in reforms of German sexual criminal law that feminist legal activists had long been calling for – albeit the topic was racially charged. To be sure, the legislative sea change was not due solely to the Cologne events and the ensuing controversy. It was brought about, in part, by decades’ worth of feminist struggles eking out partial victories. In the years immediately prior to Cologne, from 2013 on, mobilizations such as #Aufschrei¹⁰ had contributed to this trend, both online and offline. Nevertheless, it seems an ‘event’ was needed to implement the social redefinition of sexual violence already effected in German sexual criminal law. In the absence of those struggles, on the part of people in Germany and all around the world, the reform would not have been possible. For this reason, we want our book to be understood in the context of mobilizations against sexual violence all over the world: #MeToo, #NiUnaMenos, #SenDeAnlat, #BalanceTonPorc, #GamAni and more. These struggles – which go far beyond hashtags and ‘clicktivism’ – have been instrumental in making visible the scope and the local character of sexual violence globally. Behind each hashtag lies a multitude of stories, experiences, battles and flavors of sexual violence. And even in these mass mobilizations, what people are naming and negotiating is, more often than not, the difficult questions of the relation of the general to the particular, the specific to the common.¹¹

There is no way to grasp ‘Cologne’ without reference to what the media were calling, at the time, ‘the long summer of migration’: the summer of 2015. The Syrian Civil War had raged, at that point, for five years. Eleven million Syrians had been displaced; almost 4 million of them became refugees. Syria’s neighbours had already exhausted their capacity to accommodate them. So, asylum seekers started to make their way to Europe – via the ‘Balkan Route’. Following Angela Merkel’s decision not to close the nation’s borders, Germany gave refuge to approximately 1 million people.¹²

But it wasn’t only the numbers of those seeking to enter Europe that increased dramatically that summer. Simple awareness of the realities of war spread rapidly during that time across Western European populations that had hitherto largely enjoyed obliviousness in this regard – at least ever since the so-called Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, during which Germany took in just under 400,000 refugees. Now thousands of people – mothers carrying small children, elderly people, entire families – sought to escape the conflict on foot, leaving everything they had behind, waiting for days on end in makeshift camps in Greece, at train stations in Hungary, at motorway rest stops in Serbia, on riverbanks and roadsides and next to walls and fences, hastily erected at the EU’s external perimeter, that they were prevented from passing through by Serbian, Croatian, Hungarian, Czech, Polish and Austrian border security forces. They drowned, wretchedly, trying to make the crossing to Greece or Italy. The Mediterranean Sea, that romantic destination, that paradise beloved of northwestern Europe’s middle classes, turned into a mass grave.

All this took place under conditions of ‘real time’ visibility, made possible by the new mass digital media – causing what Navid Kermani termed an ‘irruption of reality into our consciousness’.¹³ The German public, just like the global public, consumed the spectacle of desperate human beings on the verge of drowning in the Mediterranean, hoping for rescue. We were mesmerized. We saw the mountains of life jackets on Greek island beaches. We watched the people trek through the landscapes of southeastern Europe, in lines often miles long. Life vests and emergency warming foil (‘space blankets’) became readily recognizable symbols of a humanitarian catastrophe that was no longer unfolding far away, back then, over there, a long way away from us – but rather here, now, among us, where we are. The image of the three-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose body washed ashore on 2 September 2015, showed him lying on his belly on the sand, as though sleeping soundly. He was lying on the very same surf – the coast of Greece, Italy and Turkey – where middle-class German, French, Swedish and English holidaymakers love to work on their tans. We Europeans, with our money and our passports that provide unrestricted access to almost every country in the world, we for whom ‘mobility’ has exclusively positive resonances: we were confronted that summer with the deadly dimension of compulsory mobility. Was it also perhaps, in part, the historic traumas of the Shoah that were returning to German living rooms and intruding upon our smartphones? Did the images recall the ungrieved abominations of the Holocaust – or, perhaps, the ‘refugee treks’ of the late 1940s, whereby Germans were expelled from the so-called Eastern Territories after World War II? No doubt, many in Europe cannot stand to recognize themselves and their own families in the images of people and their families fleeing Syria and Libya.

Alan Kurdi, so the famous photograph informed us unequivocally, drowned during an attempt on the part of his family (who come from Aleppo) to cross from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos, which is part of the EU. When the photo in question was published, it was hailed everywhere in the mainstream media – paradoxically – as ‘a photograph fit to silence the world’.¹⁴ As though the world had not already kept silent long enough on the subject of the ordeal endured, for years, by the Syrian people! Still, Die Zeit recommended that one should ‘be silent’ in response to the image – and perhaps also, ‘insofar as one is human, weep’.¹⁵ The intention here, clearly, was to invoke an empathic silence: a silence of grief, bewilderment and, in all probability, respect for others’ suffering. But, instead of making space for grieving – instead of acknowledging that this suffering has something to do with us, does something to us, touches us, alters us – when Cologne happened, Germany took the opportunity to turn the page. Society did not tarry to consider the extent to which grieving is politics – in that some lives have the right to be grieved, to be recognized as valuable, while others aren’t even granted access to the sphere of the grievable and the human. Instead of looking and learning from the inseparability of ‘us’ (in Germany) and ‘them’ (the refugees at Europe’s borders), the affective and political atmosphere took a turn for the worse.

Even as Germany’s racist and ultranationalist voices grew louder and louder, in the public imagination, the ‘long summer of migration’ was marked, perhaps above all, by Willkommenskultur (a culture of welcome).¹⁶ As we discuss in Chapter 2 of this book, this ‘culture’ included elements of genuine civil politicization, intense and sustained mutual aid and, yes, kitsch charitable naivety. But Cologne provoked the ascendance of already existing tendencies to cynically question universal human rights via xenophobic and nationalist commonplaces, fuelling the already intensifying appetite for völkisch, populist and belligerent public discourses. And what the ‘night that changed everything’ actually changed, according to these discourses, is the viability of this dangerously naive Willkommenskultur – an ideology that supposedly asks too much, both of individuals and of country – promulgated by people that could now be derided shamelessly as ‘do-gooders’. It is telling that ‘Gutmensch’ (i.e., Good Samaritan) could become a pejorative term in this context. It was even voted ‘Unwort des Jahres’ (ghastly neologism of the year) in 2015. As reported in Der Spiegel, the jury in the competition deemed ‘Gutmensch’ and ‘Gutmenschentum’ (alternatively: Gutbürger) to be words that ‘vilify helpfulness, kindness and tolerance in generalizing terms as naive, unworldly and stupid; as symptoms of moral imperialism; or as stemming from some kind of ‘white knight’ (rescuer) complex’.¹⁷ The good, in short, became a target for mockery. This was a key element of the transformation in German society effected by and through Cologne.

Further, Germany’s entire policy orientation on refugees, asylum and migration was rewritten in the shadow of Cologne. The idea that Cologne had revealed that those ‘we’ longed to call ‘welcome’ were abusing ‘our values’ – because they hail from patriarchal and misogynistic cultures, societies riven with violence that had made, of these young male refugees, woman-hating brutes – was now acceptable currency among state officials. We personally will never be able to forget the spectacle of Horst Seehofer, the then–Bavarian prime minister (and, at the time of writing, Germany’s minister for the interior and home affairs) – a man who was still, as it happens, calling migration ‘the mother of all political problems’¹⁸ in the summer of 2018 – flirting with making ‘abuse of the asylum system’ a criminal offence, and generally agitating against refugees in the late summer of 2015.¹⁹ Subsequently, Germany moved to make asylum and migration policy (even) more restrictive: tightening asylum law generally and, in particular, tightening regulations concerning accommodation for refugees; facilitating deportations; and militarizing the German side of intra-European borders (e.g., between Germany and Austria).

This course of action reflected, and worked in tandem with, a new direction in citizenship law embodied by the Nationality Act (Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz), which targeted Muslim ‘criminals’ and perpetrators specifically, requiring that claimants to German citizenship now be not only non-criminal but ‘integrated into the German way of life’.²⁰ What on earth the ‘German way of life’ might be – who gets to define it, and how? – is a question that seems to us to have been left open on purpose, just like the question of what might happen to Germans who do not live that way. The presence of the völkisch, ethnonationalist dog whistle is unmistakable. For many years, at this point, Germany has been conducting a debate on the subjects of ‘Heimat’ (homeland) and ‘Herkunft’ (ancestry): a debate that could, in theory, prove quite useful and interesting, were it not so strongly determined by fundamentalizing conceptual foreclosures and ethnicized, identitarian preconceptions. Nonetheless, post-Cologne, there is an increased presence of new and alternative voices in this debate: polyphone, often post-migrant voices, interested in justice and equality rather than integration and assimilation. They/we are demanding to be listened to and insisting that their/our perspectives matter.²¹

It has long been clear to us that racism is a part of German culture as a whole: not only behind closed doors and not only among homespun ‘Stammtisch’ regulars in traditional taverns. Nevertheless, we experience the aforementioned poisonous and restrictive political direction, its simplistic ideological generalities and the attendant erosion of the human right to asylum as almost unbearable, especially in light of Germany’s particular responsibilities vis-à-vis history. Racist and xenophobic – also antisemitic – attitudes were never absent from Germany, in West or East; they were never even fully marginalized. Besides the remarkable continuity of Nazi elites in politics, economy, jurisdiction and cultural realms in West Germany, the white-supremacist assassinations carried out by the National Socialist Underground²² between 2000 and 2007 bear witness to such ideology – as does the well-documented participation of German law-enforcement officers and constitutional authorities in far-right networks. The pogroms targeting refugee shelters and hostels housing asylum seekers in Hoyerswerda²³ in September 1991 – and in Rostock-Lichtenhagen²⁴ in August 1992 – bear witness to the prevalence of racism in Germany. The racist murders in Mölln²⁵ in November 1992 and in Solingen²⁶ in May 1993 bear witness to it. The racist murder of Marwa El-Sherbini on July 1, 2009, in a German courtroom in Dresden bears witness to it.²⁷ And the innumerable, sometimes subtle, sometimes clearly and openly articulated aggressions and microaggressions that characterize German everyday life – in all areas of society and all institutions, be they schools or universities, public bureaucracies or sporting arenas – bear witness to it. Such is the day-to-day reality, the normal state of existence, for everyone who does not present the ethnicized image of the ‘real German’. In Germany, too, Jewish institutions, such as schools and synagogues, have required police protections and armed security for decades. While we were finishing the English edition of this book, the synagogue in Halle was violently attacked on Yom Kippur (9 October) 2019 by a young German man, who on the self-recorded video he uploaded on social media during his terror spray identifies as a misogynist, anti-feminist, anti-Semitic and racist Holocaust denier. Luckily, the door of the synagogue resisted. But others weren’t as fortunate; the shooter gunned down a woman passing by outside the synagogue and killed a man in an Arab fast-food shop nearby. We mourn for all lost lives and are once again infuriated by the comments of many leading German politicians for their rhetoric of surprise and shock. As if this attack came out of the blue, fully unexpected. As if more or less violent anti-Semitism weren’t part of German normality.

In the German-speaking world, our book has experienced a gratifyingly broad and serious reception. At the time of publication, we gave a great number of readings and participated in many discussions. These always proved lively and often even explosive. In essence, this itself tended to clarify what was at stake and confirm to us the value of what we are advocating, namely the art of thinking-indifference: a practice of differentiation, of differentiating thought. On the one hand, speaking and arguing, controversy and debate, are needed now more than ever before. At the same time, they’re rendered more difficult through the prevalence of discursive authoritarianisms and fundamentalisms: discourses that foreclose things even as they posit them. For example, we have found it unreasonably arduous in practice to go about criticizing certain contemporary feminist positions. Certainly, feminist speech has always been structurally subject to devaluations and attacks, and it is reasonable to demand that criticisms be carefully formulated with the utmost sensitivity to context and effect. But we have noticed that people too often experience ambivalences and nuances as unendurable, literally: as too much to ‘endure’. We lay out the specifics of this in Chapter 4, with our critique of ‘toxic feminisms’ – a genre epitomized for us, inter alia, by Alice Schwarzer. An active and influential figure in the German-speaking world, Schwarzer founded EMMA in 1977 (a magazine she still retains control over today, as editor in chief); and she is probably, as it happens, the only really well-known German second-wave feminist.

Over the last few years, our criticisms of Schwarzer’s feminism have been repeatedly interpreted as inadmissible speech – as denigration of the person of Alice Schwarzer herself and as a lack of respect for her lifelong efforts on behalf of the ostensibly unitary category ‘feminism’. This assumption shows that in contemporary political space, persons and positions are all too often elided. If nothing else, we hope we have identified that tendency – across the political spectrum, from right to left – and treated it with the seriousness it deserves. In short, individuals themselves, and their political attitudes (whether avowed and/or ascribed), are often equated with their ascribed social positions, which is to say: their group, class, religion, gender, sexual orientation or cultural milieu. We call this epistemic operation ‘positional fundamentalism’. Its prevalence betokens how difficult it has become to describe realities (for example, political and social realities) in all their complexity and nuance. Discursive traps are sprung and snapped shut. Debates are too tightly hemmed in between binary formulas, antagonisms and oversimplifications. Acts of recognition, in and despite difference and critique, become impossible.

What we hoped to achieve with our book, in the final analysis, is to have contributed to our collective understanding of the contemporary entanglements between sexism, (cultural) racism and feminism: between, on the one hand, the battle against what a transnational and heterogeneous alliance now calls ‘gender ideology’ and the fight, on the other hand, against the so-called Islamization of the West.

The ‘anti-gender alliance’ – the subject of our previous book, Anti-Genderism (Anti-Genderismus, 2015) – encompasses the Vatican as well as a number of related conservative Catholic groups devoted to the defence of tradition, family and the sanctity of private property. But its actors also include the Catholic women’s movement in Poland; a number of evangelical churches around the world; La Manif Pour Tous (‘The Demo for Everyone’) in France; Pegida in Germany (‘Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident’); entire political parties, such as Alternative für Deutschland (the AfD) in Germany, Rassemblement National (‘National Rally’, formerly Le Front National) in France, and Geert Wilders’s Partij Voor de Vrijheid (‘Party for Freedom’) in the Netherlands; organized groupings of ‘concerned parents’ who campaign against the alleged ‘sexualization of children’; neoconservative men’s rights campaigners and other identitarian movements; self-appointed defenders of the ‘right to life’; conservative environmentalists; assorted masculinist and high-profile journalists and bloggers calling themselves scholars or scientists; and outright fascist entities such as the extreme-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).

For these rather heterogenous constellations and actors, the push-back against modernization, sexual diversity, gender theory, migration, and Islam (all together) form a potential platform for coalitions. They offer points of entry even within the educated, liberal spectrum. What is actually conjured is a version of ‘the people’, an entity that is being contaminated by things alien to its essence and whose existence is threatened by a superfluity of foreigners. This is the threat the aforementioned mobilize when they claim to be safeguarding the values and achievements of the West, of Christianity, of the Enlightenment against ‘Islamization’ and against the purported ‘genderization’ of the Western world; against fundamentalist terror and ethnic ‘swamping’; against migrants and refugees; against intellectual elites; against freedom of academic speech; against ‘liars’ in the press; or against the state and its representatives tout court. The favored method is shutdown (first cultural and subsequently legal and political) as a way of defending the achievements of whichever ‘we’ is at stake – the nation, the people, the nuclear family, Christianity – against outsiders. The world is interpreted in Manichaean dichotomies, in antagonisms between inside and outside, and these are aligned with distinctions between the valuable and the valueless, between those who may live and those who may not.

It is a revolt that builds upon – or breathes life into – the notion that the state’s task should be to protect the interests, the morality, the lifestyles of its ‘own’ group, regarded as the only one with legitimacy or an entitlement to stake any claim. The state, such is the constantly repeated complaint, is failing to fulfil that obligation. Instead, ‘the establishment’ extends its hand not to our own people but to the outsiders, allocating cheap housing and social welfare to refugees and adding insult to injury by urging us to practice compassion. ‘The system’ is guilty of betrayal. In this sense, the sometimes preposterous agitation against migrants, ‘Islam’, ‘dirty Green and lefty do-gooders’, and equally against what the German activists call the ‘genderistas’, must also be counted as part of a well-orchestrated vendetta against the establishment and a release from the affective and linguistic norms of politically correct behaviour that, in the last instance, has as its target the abolition of liberal democracy itself.

In pursuit of that goal, these groups mobilize patterns that have sedimented into society’s unconscious over centuries: forms of segmentation and distinction between human beings for the purposes of stigmatization, exclusion or segregation, along with the xenophobic hostility located deep in the foundations of modern societies.

The ‘enlightened fundamentalism’ (Liz Fekete) of the European populist right is not only to be found in the instrumentalization of women, lesbians, gay men and other ‘minorities’ on behalf of xenophobic policies; it also informs the antagonistic and embattled attitude that typifies toxic racist speech. Regarding feminism, the front line is dual and contradictory. A particular form of feminism is co-opted for populism’s own ends – on the one hand, to agitate against migration, Islam and the foreigners; on the other, to wage war on particular other feminisms, namely those that interrogate hegemonic gender and sexual norms. Western achievements such as the legal near-equality of the sexes or the criminalization of sexual violence, but even more importantly the concepts of gender duality, heterosexuality and family, are defended against both outward and inward enemies: outwardly against those whom the culturally essentialist imagination sees as uncivilized and retrograde, or as an uncontrollable sex mob, and inwardly against the ‘genderistas’ and queers who, so the story goes, wish to force their ideas of how to live gender and sexuality down ordinary Germans’ throats. The othering of those considered alien, with the intention of keeping them at a distance, is therefore directly connected with the vilification of sexual and gender minorities and dissident feminists. The AfD and Pegida go into battle not only against the ‘Islamization’ of the West, but also against what they call its ‘genderization’.

We see here the revival of unequivocal friend-enemy dichotomies, the demonization of the other, and an insistence on the supposed self that must be defended against all that is alien to it – the return of concepts that in Germany are strongly associated with Nazi discourse, such as Volk, ‘nation’, or ‘race’, along with a recourse to ‘homeland’, ‘culture’, and ‘identity’. There is talk of foreigners ‘crushing’ or ‘flooding’ our country, destabilizing our social systems, flouting our values, and unfairly receiving things that rightly belong to ‘us’ alone. All this indicates just how drastically the boundaries of what can be said have shifted towards the authoritarian and neoreactionary, away from an orientation towards democracy, universal human rights and political pluralism. Disrespect, hate speech and verbal derision, threats of violence, and violent acts including racist murders have become firm components of social coexistence – a brutalization of civic life. This crude discourse manifests a grammar of harshness, of imputation and suspicion, of ostracism and obloquy, all of which increasingly define commentary in the public sphere. It is a way of thinking interested neither in analytical precision nor in critiquing the parochial partiality of one’s own perspective. It is also a way of thinking that disregards the individual person and the circumstances in which they find themselves, that ascribes characteristics, totalizing them and making them synonymous with the person as a whole; one that distills social verdicts out of abstractions and locates itself on the moral high ground above those it has identified as responsible for the hated state of affairs.

This is a language that is both unambiguous and global and that is not the language of dialogue and nonviolence, the language of democracy and freedom, the language of conversation between different people who are nevertheless one another’s equals. The Future of Difference is our attempt to counteract this violence, which is as epistemic as it is lethal, for it is the language of disaster, which, as Maurice Blanchot put it many years ago in The Writing of the Disaster, ‘ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact’.²⁸