Interpreting a settler-related impulse in Today's Middle East: notes for the analysis of a Settler Archive.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Veracini, Lorenzo
• Date: 01 January 2003

A dramatic shift in US policy towards the Middle East has manifested itself in recent years. The Bush administration has been adamant in its commitment to war, even against the evidence provided by intelligence agencies and Wall Street's view that it was not in the United States' long-term interests. A number of observers and scholars have tried to explain this policy shift in economic terms, for example, the protection of US oil interests or that it is intended as a Keynesian kick-start to the US economy. These seem especially insufficient explanations if one considers that oil was already directly or indirectly controlled by the United States and that military spending had already reached its upper limit in the current budgetary allocations. Some other explanation is called for. Here I propose an interpretation of recent shifts in US Middle East policy and sensibilities in terms of the activation of a settler consciousness in American political discourse.

In the first section of this article I outline in very broad terms the long history of settler colonial projects and delineate what I call the settler archive of the Euro-American imagination. In the second section, drawing on this outline of the settler archive, I propose an alternative interpretation of recent shifts in US Middle East policy and sensibilities.

Loosely following Michael Foucault's analysis of the history of culture in The Archeology of Knowledge, I consider the Western settler consciousness a discursive and ideological practice which uses a 'settler archive'. (1) This archive has been constituted in numerous passages of political, religious and colonial history over the last five centuries. Whereas the archeology of other types of colonial imagination has already (and authoritatively) been approached, the settler consciousness of the European gaze has yet to find its Edward Said. (2)

This archive--constantly tested, updated, added to and continuously transforming itself through time--has been readily available to be mobilized in different contexts and for different objectives. I propose to understand this settler mentality and its ultimately ethnocidal racism as neither a fully fledged ideology or coherent conceptual system nor a discourse. Rather, it is a flexible practice that one can enter into and depart from at different moments. Individuals, groups, cultural and political movements, and states have adopted this practice throughout history for different purposes and in different contexts, with extremely diverse consequences. Even today--remaining settlers aside and despite momentous shifts, including decolonization and the emergence of postcolonial perspectives--this archive and practice can be effectively adopted in some public domains. Recent examples of this include American Christian fundamentalist groups and their unswerving support for Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories, and British and Australian exceptional and disproportionate interest in Zimbabwean affairs.

The settler archive that this ideological and discursive practice mobilizes is a repertoire of images, notions, concepts, narratives, stereotypes and thoughts (for example, 'empty/unused lands', 'dying races', 'Manifest Destinies') that have been accumulated and brought together in the Euro-American imagination at least since the Protestant Reformation and the Irish Plantation of the sixteenth century. (3) While Calvinism played a fundamental role in the early settler experiences of the European expansion, in Ulster, New England, and especially in South Africa (a long-lasting workshop of the settler archive), a Calvinist sensibility has traditionally focused on self-supporting, strictly bordered, ethnically and religiously cohesive communities. (4)

These conceptualizations are sedimented forms of popular and scientific racism, drawing on a specific interpretative tradition of Exodus, in which a biblically elected people takes over a promised land and disperses the Canaanite original inhabitants. (5) The settler archive of the European imagination has benefited from the most diverse and exotic colonial experiences and, as mentioned, is still detectable in more modern versions of settler mentality, for example, the need to force an ethnocentric assimilation upon the indigenous peoples of settler nations, or over non-European migrants to former colonial metropolises. (6) Even the post-apartheid South African administration's ambiguous handling of AIDS can be related to the legacy of a settler routine. One interpretation of the government's stance is that it is reluctant to accept a medicalizing gaze over communities that bore the brunt of apartheid; that it is unwilling to allow the official return of an apartheid-related typology of social intervention, which is to say, a mindset that pathologizes, segregates, racializes and invariably constructs Black and poor as categories 'at risk'--types to be surveyed, sedated and dealt with pharmaceutically. (7)

A specific 'library' of the colonial imagination has been formed thanks to a collection of authors, works and texts--anonymous, collective, individual, literary, medical, political, philosophical, scientific (including a specific reading of Darwin, Renan, Kipling, Gobineau and, alternatively, Conrad's denunciation)--as well as through a number of events, only sometimes associated with the history of European colonialism proper. (8) The Protestant Reformation, the wars of religion and the displacements of communities around Europe and the world they caused; the French Revolution, and especially its Haitian reverberations; the new emergence of anti-Semitic tendencies and milieux; the appeal of genocidal impulses (every...