Redressing racism, communicating citizenship: state legitimation techniques in the multicultural metropolis

Perceptions of declining legitimacy have pushed State actors to pursue new methods of citizen engagement. Implicated in states’ attempts to adjust their own legitimacy, on the one hand, and relations between their citizens, on the other, is the rise of political marketing (PM) (Lees-Marchment, 2008; Mortimore, 2003), though scholars are uneasy with the credo that we the public are consumers who buy into a packaged political product (Harris, 2001; Moufahim & Lim, 2009; Newman, 1999; Savigny, 2008; Scammell, 2003; Scullion, 2008). Conversely, social marketing (SM) is envisaged as precluding politics. SM aims ‘not to benefit the marketer but the target audience and the general society. Social marketing programmes … are generic marketing programmes carried out to change behaviours that are in the individual's or society's interests’ (Andreasen & Kotler cited in Madill & Abele, 2007, p. 30). While harm-reductive apolitical motivation is intended to supplant any implied political or business-model with the caveat that SM is ‘silent about who is to define well-being’ (Andreasen, 1994, p. 112), state-initiated ‘persuasive behaviour modification’ falls within the parameters of state legitimation. This article describes one such campaign, undertaken in Scotland in the early years of this millennium. Analysis of the devolved Scottish polity's ₤1-million social marketing communication campaign One Scotland, Many Cultures – launched in 2002 under the rubric of the Blair government's UK-wide race strategy – reveals that the concept of legitimacy generates insights that strict PM/SM conceptual boundaries suppress. The social marketing of ‘good race relations’ is inherently political: metropolitan state legacies of racial oppression, the ‘deorientalizing’ effect of immigration on ‘the holy trinity of sovereignty, citizenship and national identity’ (Bader, 2008, p. 2; see also Kraus, 2006), and ‘white backlash’ (Hewitt, 2005) govern content.

The aim of this paper, to analyse state sponsored social marketing, can be located within an established ethnic and migration studies concern which suggests that metropolitan states have, despite national differences in public philosophy, historically depoliticized antiracist struggles while engaging in racist practices themselves (Lentin, 2004; Maeso, 2014; Schain, 2008; Shukra, 1998). Findings resonate, in part, with studies of contemporary redress in settler-colonial states which indicate that legitimation is often sought via neutral therapeutic arbitration. Where settler-colonial states dissociate from previous government injustices by recognizing past neglect, they adopt a ‘neutral’ ethos of care which redefines and reorients solution, not simply towards ‘neoliberalized’ individuals, but to a post-rational policy subject (Humphrey, 2005; see also Pupavac, 2005). Similarly, metropolitan state legitimation techniques employ discourses of affect to engage both ‘anti-hate’ resistances (McElhinny, 2010; Ramos-Zayas, 2012) and ‘pro-hate’ rejectionists (Chakraborti & Garland, 2014; Waltman, 2014). However, One Scotland, Many Cultures (OSMC) was initiated by a new devolved polity with no prior ‘race relations’ history and no jurisdiction over British immigration prescriptions – powers which remained reserved to Westminster. OSMC therefore represented an official antiracist intervention that was both distinct from and part of the British metropolitan context in which it operated. Consequently, the campaign's activation of affective appeals to multiethnic constituencies reflected both continuity and change. Moreover, the material analysed here remains relevant across the ‘pre-referendum/post-referendum divide’. As affective legitimation techniques are not region-, nation- or administration-specific, it is likely that they will continue to frame metropolitan multiculturalism into the future.¹

Studies of State redress have focused attention on official policies and programmes aimed at the remediation of past injustice carried out by settler-colonial states against colonized indigenous peoples: actions of redress comprise ‘“national reconciliation” projects … initiated to address … historical injustice suffered by minorities, especially colonized indigenous ones, whose loss and trauma have long gone unrecognized and uncompensated’ (Humphrey, 2005, p. 203). Where some critical approaches aim to hold the state to account, others seek to explore the statal implications of redress. Examining the Canadian state's redressive response to historical wrongdoing towards indigenous peoples, Winter (2011) argues that by apologizing for past injustice, the state-citizen relation is recast because the state's ‘[d]issociation removes a reason for resisting subjective identification. Making the state something other than what it was, redress makes citizen affiliation, and consequently legitimation, possible’ (p. 806). The recognition of past injustice dissociates the state from past oppression, with the aim of activating subjective legitimation.

The settler-colonial citizenship context need not distract us from the conceptual applicability of redress to European metropoles where minority ethnic citizens – many of whom are the descendants of racialized postcolonial migrants – remain stigmatized and in receipt of discriminatory treatment, presenting metropolitan states with legitimation needs specific to their respective histories of colonial oppression. That national reconciliation projects are State strategies of restorative rather than retributive justice, ‘designed to help recover sovereignty and legitimacy’ (Humphrey, 2005, p. 203), need not imply regional exclusivity. The citizenship focus used by Winter, although he himself does not take this step, provides a useful bridge to the European multiethnic context:

Citizenship brings redress under the analytical orbit of legitimation, allowing us to extend the analysis to European metropoles where recognition of minority ethnic claims necessarily dovetails with a further pillar of legitimation – the regulation and integration of immigration (see Barbero, 2012).

Clearly government, as State executor, is an agent of legitimation, and state legitimacy generally acquires subjective allegiance if ‘the way in which … policies, practices, and behaviours’ of a state complement ‘the disposition of the culture’ in which they are enacted. Legitimation deficit connotes state-actors’ lack of success in justifying their mandate ‘via the interests, orientation, and expectations of society’ (Nolan, 1998, p. 22). If, as Beetham argues, a ‘power relationship is not legitimate because people believe in its legitimacy, but because it can be justified in terms of their beliefs’ (1991, p. 11), then the legitimation of metropolitan power related to immigration requires that State actions be justified in terms of the beliefs of its citizens. Liberal-democratic state-immigration actions are validated formally in laws which acquire justification through codes of cultural belonging. For example, Margaret Thatcher's metropolitan maxim that ‘British values are threatened by New Commonwealth immigrants’ codified British national belonging as normatively ‘white’, justifying actions such as the 1981 British Nationality Act so as to regulate ‘non-white threat’. The Act in turn validated the maxim. Yet in multiethnic metropoles, cultural belonging is a contested domain, and state-immigration actions enlist consent from a population that may be divided between those who reject and those who accept metropolitan justifications. Either way, culturally-unjustifiable state-immigration actions can compromise political elites in democratic metropoles. The legitimation needs of the state are implicit in the search for remedy, and it is such needs that should be explored analytically within metropolitan state-sponsored programmes of persuasive attitude shift.

The UK's post-war reception of migrants from its former colonies has been well documented. Whether pro (Hansen, 2000; Spencer, 1994) or anti (Cohen, Humphries, & Mynott, 2002; Shukra, 1998) the idea that immigration controls can be racially non-discriminatory; scholars agree that the British post-war immigration framework institutionalized an idiom of racialized threat through which colonial migrants were signified as ‘non-white’ and negatively identified as posing some form of ‘race relations menace’. Framed by Labour MP Roy Hattersley's famous aphorism of 1965 that ‘Without integration, limitation is inexcusable; without limitation, integration is impossible’ (Solomos, 1989, p. 37), British law sought to avoid a ‘race relations problem’ by implementing an integration-based anti-discrimination strategy which included limiting the numbers of migrants: the ‘numbers argument’. Racialized migrants were, by default, held responsible for the negative reaction their presence (in sufficient numbers) was deemed to elicit. The State legitimized itself with the ‘white British’ population via racialized threat. Today, while there are potentially legitimizing consequences to redressing the negative experience of minority ethnic British citizens, doing so can delegitimize the State through ‘white backlash’ (Hewitt, 2005).

When New Labour came to power in the UK 1997 General Election following 18 years of Conservative Party rule, it perceived its mandate as being premised on cultural change, an understanding that ‘traditional national identities have become highly problematic’ (Füredi, 2004, p. 164). An abiding theme of this perceived and desired cultural shift, embodied symbolically within the brand Cool Britannia (see Van Ham, 2001), was the need to foster a cohesive ethnically diverse citizenship identity. British foreign secretary Robin Cook encapsulated this perceived need in his widely covered 2001 speech to the Social Market Foundation in London,

The signified ‘non-white/not British’ homogenization of postcolonial migrants is broken by cultural diversity (Hall, 1999), but ‘the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences’ reformulated Hattersley's ‘limitation’ aphorism to a cultural integration model more befitting the Third Way's pursuit of cosmopolitan nationalism (Kyriakides, 2008). During its time in office, New Labour was described by one commentator as ‘a project without a subject’ – that is, a top-down creation not made by a constituency of supporters to whom it could respond (Heartfield, 2002, pp. 174–201). For New Labour elites, the pursuit of a diversity ethos had to contend with a general absence of consent. The contemporary need to recognize the lived experience of resident UK-born descendants of racialized post-war migrants dovetailed with the wider legitimacy need to connect with the UK population as a whole. Legitimacy was a central concern as the Blair administration searched for subjective allegiance. An additional legitimation need was generated by national autonomy claims from within the UK unitary state and the demand for Scottish independence appeared as a movement of delegitimation.

New Labour's 1997 referendum on Scottish devolution reflected the administration's pre-election pledge to address past neglect; what it saw as a deep-rooted Scottish national desire for independence from the UK parliamentary system was to be keyed into and turned towards a New Britain (Blair, 1996). As a means of government-fostering State legitimacy, the move tied in with long-term Scotland-based pro-referendum campaigns such as the Scottish Constitutional Convention (Lynch, 1996). Scotland's historical anti-Conservative Party stance spoke to the UK government's lack of representative authority, facilitating and facilitated by a Scottish Labourite-Nationalist political culture (Keating & Bleiman, 1979; Mitchell & Bennie, 1996). Any referendum and devolution of specific powers from Westminster would represent the unitary state's responsiveness and restore legitimacy, but to complicate matters the UK-wide absence of democratic engagement was replicated in Scotland when only 60% of the Scottish electorate turned out to vote, 25% of which voted against. The newly devolved Scottish parliament was inaugurated in 1999 amid a shortfall in positive turnout for any state, which by default undercut the Blair government's expected legitimation effect.² It was within the symbolic framework of this political culture that Scotland's newly elected New Labour government consciously attempted, in pursuit of a legitimizing subject, to redress by appealing to majority and minority ‘communities of past neglect’. In the remainder of this paper we will explore how ‘OSMC’ operationalized redressive State legitimation in the communication of persuasive attitude shifts for multicultural citizenship.

This paper presents a combined analysis of two research components drawn from a wider study: (1) an institutional account of the making of OSMC, and (2) a content analysis of the campaign materials involved. The first acknowledges that ‘ … institutionalized action … need[s] to be justified or accounted for … in order to be legitimate’ and this ‘is an inseparable part of action itself’. The second pursues a ‘narrative mode of knowing’ in that we are interested in ‘the proximity between literary metaphors and the notion of institutions, emphasizing that institutions are not just patterns of action’ (Czarniawska, 2002, p. 733). Institutionalized accounts are operationalized through ‘textually-mediated social organization’, emphasizing the relationship between ruling relations, institutions and texts (Smith, 2002, p. 45).³ The textuality of institutions refers to the policy narrative through which the relations of ruling are generalized across local settings. In this sense, the devolved Scottish polity's antiracist communications should link with British relations of ruling through policy documents, committee-meeting minutes, public statements, parliamentary debates and media campaigns pertaining to racism.

In-depth one-to-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with individuals selected according to their recognized experience and qualification, conceptualized here as elites (Odendahl & Shaw, 2002). Elites involved in the process of overseeing and/or devising the OSMC campaign were selected in order to ascertain what they perceived the issues around antiracism to be.⁴ Topic guides explored specific interviewees’ remits. Primary interest was in the tacit knowledge – collection of general meanings, political assumptions – underpinning complex types of arguments. Anticipating unexpected information, interview style allowed freedom of movement in the formulation of questions, follow-up strategies and sequencing (Hopf, 2004).

Following House's (2002) insight that ‘[a]nti-racism within each Western European country has a separate if interconnected history, molded and often channeled by the various aspects of a specific country's political culture and colonial legacies’ (p. 211), we sought to apprehend the reproduction of policy goals in relation to OSMC whilst remaining cognizant of the relationship, engendered by the British state, between ‘race relations’ legislation and immigration law. A multi-stage, iterative, thematic-based framework was adopted when coding and analysing the interview transcripts:

• What were the aims of the antiracist campaign?

• What assumptions underpinned the making of the antiracist campaign?

• In what way did these assumptions inform decisions?

• How did decisions link with the policy narrative of the British state towards ‘race and immigration’?

Interviews were combined with content analysis of OSMC campaign materials – TV, radio, cinema and billboard advertisements – selected from the campaign's first and second phases. Campaign material provided a snapshot of the official antiracist policy narrative: how ‘racism’ was being typified as a problem in need of solution.⁵ By pairing interpretation of the ads with findings generated at interview, we unravel the presuppositions that implicitly inform the narrative (Fairclough, 2001) to unveil the causal story, the claims, advanced through antiracist policy (Stone, 1989). ‘Claims makers’ selectively shape problem definition, emphasizing and/or de-emphasizing specific elements that frame the parameters of a social problem (Best, 1999). As Atkinson (2000) highlights, policy analysis requires that we ‘understand the “problems” to which policy is responding … why, and how, a particular issue … comes to be defined as a problem’ and that

Problem parameters must include a subject perpetrator (the agent who/which causes the problem) and a subject targeted by the perpetrator. The posited course of action depends on defining agent causation, and such definition relies upon an assumed nature of the legitimizing subject. It is the implicit assumption of what constitutes the racist subject/agent within the process of typification which is essential to the causal story advanced.

In September 2002, the newly devolved Scottish polity launched its ₤1-million antiracist media campaign, One Scotland, Many Cultures. The first of its kind in the UK, OSMC's launch received UK-wide media coverage and was the subject of a Scottish parliamentary debate. Anecdotally OSMC provoked a mixed response. BBC Scotland screened a live television debate, Pride and Prejudice, on the campaign's merits. Some in the audience were bemused, some dismissive, others welcoming. Surprise that Scotland had a ‘race problem’ drew attention to the silenced experience of minority ethnic migrant populations settled within a post-imperial centre. The historical legacy of Scottish involvement in the British Empire (MacKenzie & Devine, 2011) and the problem of race which this entailed had been somewhat masked by the Scottish neo-nationalist claim since the 1970s that Scotland itself was an internal colony dominated by England (Hechter, 1975).

OSMC initially seemed to address what had long been referred to as the ‘No race problem here myth’. A consequence of the ‘numbers argument’, the myth built on the UK's policy-view that ‘race relations’ problems were dependent on the number of settled migrants; hence the low number of migrants settled in Scotland when compared with England led to the myopic conclusion that ‘race relations’ were not an issue, much to the consternation of those targeted by racism on a daily basis (Miles & Dunlop, 1986; Miles & Muirhead, 1986).⁶ Consequently, the British state's post-war ‘liberal race relations’ paradigm, the legislative signification of ‘non-white colonial migrant threat’ and the racist response that this gave rise to, were increasingly contested by the formation, from the early 1980s, of Black self-organized political groups in Scotland, whose explicit aim was to challenge and draw attention to their hitherto ignored racist treatment (Dunlop, 1993). A number of high-profile independent campaigns throughout the 1990s, which highlighted black and minority ethnic’ experiences of racism in Scotland, dovetailed with the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in London in 1993 and the widely publicised 1998 public inquiry led by Sir William Macpherson into the police mishandling of the case. As we will go on to demonstrate, Macpherson's verdict of ‘institutional racism’, published in his report of 1999, had legitimacy repercussions in Scotland where, it was argued, state institutions had historically neglected the experiences of black and minority ethnic Scots. The 1999 inauguration of the unitary state's devolved Scottish administration therefore has to be contextualized within UK immigration and citizenship law (reserved to Westminster) which historically legitimized the second-class treatment of those signified as ‘non-white’.⁷ This is poignant when situating antiracist initiatives launched by the Scottish Executive and it touches on legitimation matters related to signified ‘non-white’ and ‘white’ Scots.

It would be wrong to interpret OSMC as Machiavellian. While the British state has a long and well-documented history of institutional racism, as a new institution the devolved Scottish polity has no such history. Both civil servants and politicians with direct responsibility for overseeing OSMC's initial production and launch considered that racism was a problem in Scotland not only in its own right but because it had been neglected by the non-devolved Scottish Office of the British state. Although jurisdiction over immigration remained with Westminster, and state actors and campaign-makers were under no illusion that an ad-campaign could eradicate racism, there was a genuine attempt, driven by personal and political conviction, to address both institutional discrimination and the negative stigmatization of ‘non-white’ migrants. This was confirmed by Head of the Scottish Executive's Equality Unit, Yvonne Strachan:⁸

Addressing racial oppression required institutional reform and tackling what had until then been hidden by inaction. Redressing previous government neglect included recognizing the experience of discrimination, but recognition was also crucial to the devolved government's approach as a means of fostering institutional legitimacy. Inequality in the decision-making process ties into the need to redress the exclusion and lack of representativeness fostered by past inaction. It was a significant development then, when in 1999, New Labour Scotland's then Deputy Minister for Communities Jackie Baillie announced the formation of a Racial Equality Advisory Forum. The aim was to ‘eradicate institutionalized racism in all areas of Scottish life’, and to ascertain ‘the best way for the Executive to consult people from ethnic minority backgrounds’ (Scottish Executive, 1999). Challenging racism and recognizing issues through consultation with groups previously neglected would settle scores with the past. Like Strachan, Baillie confirmed that she had been aware of an absence of state-backed antiracist measures in pre-devolution Scotland:⁹ The devolved polity recognizes past inaction and expands the remit of social justice to move from an economy-centric focus to include and redress ‘extra-economic’ recognition considerations such as race. Baillie was serious about government taking a stand against racism in Scotland and, mirroring the diversity push endorsed by Robin Cook, understood racism as a problem of national culture vis-à-vis diversity. The creation of an ethnically diverse citizenship identity required conditions conducive to its enactment, and that meant tackling obstacles by recognizing Scotland's multiethnic experience of discrimination and inequality. A Scottish culture of denial in respect of racism was an obstacle, not only to tackling racism, but also to fostering a sense of confidence in Government. I asked why it had been important to establish the Racial Equality Action Forum (REAF) as a consultation platform with minority ethnic groups and what the minister felt the consequences of not doing so would have been? An ethnically stratified Scottish social base required policy segmentation along ethnic lines. Minorities were neglected victims of racism, service users and political consumers that needed to be catered for. The Scottish Executive's approach to tackling racism locates the roots of the problem in past inaction. By recognizing past inaction, minority engagement with process is to be secured. The move entails that a solution to racism is tied to legitimation. Baillie's cognizance of disengagement as a society-wide problem resonates with wider observations (Pharr & Putnam, 2000). One rationale underpinning OSMC's development was that declining confidence in political institutions is a result of past failures of government. Government's capacity to act – its institutional performance – is linked to new public expectations and criteria by which people judge their political representatives. Consequently, the promotion of a wider equality portfolio structured a policy mix predicated on the need to engage disaffected ethnic (minority and majority) political consumers in Government process through redressive action: The work culminated in the launch of OSMC, but the campaign could not be extricated from the need to engage citizen’ allegiance across ethnic groups. Redress was an active force driving the Scottish Executive's antiracist communication campaign and it cohered the desire to include through positive equality measures. As Yvonne Strachan made clear, the main question was felt to be Evidently, the Scottish Executive recognized that ‘[a]ffiliation with a citizenship is a means … by which a person sees the state as an extension of herself’ (Winter, p. 802), and therefore a political decision had been taken to establish inclusion through diversity. But as we shall go on to demonstrate, the need to legitimate and the need to promote inclusive cultural symbols were experienced by the campaign-makers as contradictory. In the following sections, we shall discuss how the contradiction shaped the remit of the campaign, framed the parameters of acceptable content and ultimately affected how ‘racism’ was to be persuasively articulated as a problem in need of solution.

As previously noted, studies of State redress have indicated that tackling past wrongs allows the state to dissociate from those wrongs, to build citizen identification and hence legitimacy. But the production of OSMC reveals that dissociating the ‘multicultural’ state from past neglect also risks losing legitimacy. State-backed antiracism is confronted by the need for cognitive legitimation.¹² I spoke with Chris Wallace, then Managing Director of Barkers Advertising (Edinburgh). Wallace was responsible for meeting the Scottish Executive's initial brief.¹³ He confirmed that the campaign was seen as a tool for generating active constituencies with a stake in antiracism policy. I asked about the terms of the commissioned brief. He said:

Even prior to the decision to go ahead with an ad-campaign, the concern to engage ‘stakeholder’ or ‘constituency buy-in’ grounded the initiative. Moreover, this was not a separate, discreet aim of the possible campaign. The potential for precipitating attitude shift – that is, for addressing racism – was anchored by the prior need to engage multiethnic constituencies. The marketing agency had, in effect, become a party to legitimation. Its role was being cast as a constituency builder, and it was facing the same problem as any flagging political party – the need to key into different interests across an ethnically fragmented social base. A ‘circle had to be squared’ persuasively if a sense of identification with the state's social policy initiatives was to be fostered. This became equally clear when testing campaign ideas on the ‘ethnic majority’. The legitimation-need to engage coerced the neutrality of social marketing communications and this was so integral to the campaign that it usurped even the personal beliefs of the campaign-makers. Wallace is saying that even though he agreed ‘non-white ethnic Scots’ were the true victims of racism in Scotland, this could not be explicitly acknowledged by the ad-campaign if the engagement of ‘whites’ (who objected) was to be secured against racism; that is, if the campaign was to serve the purpose of multiethnic cognitive legitimation. But the ‘delicate balancing act’ has an effect on the meaning of ‘racism’ to be represented by the ads. In support of Wallace, the idea that ‘racism is a two-way street’ is a contested idea within the ethnic studies literature; it represents a political definition of a social problem in terms of the contact and relations between racialized groups within the population. ‘Racism’ is understood not as a structural social problem, but as a behavioural and/or attitudinal problem which cuts across ethnicity. More problematically, ‘racism as a two-way street’ does not exist without context and it reproduces the signification of ‘non-white migrant threat’ and ‘white victim’ mobilized by British immigration law. The reluctance of ‘white Scots’ to see themselves as the sole perpetrators of racism indicates that ‘racism’ is thought of (by some ‘whites’) as a mutual problem of contact relations between ethnic groups, that is, ‘non-whites’ pose a threat to ‘whites’ who subsequently react defensively against the threat. This is precisely the metropolitan integration logic set out in post-war British law, hitherto hidden in the Scottish context. The campaign uncovered and was confronted by this dynamic, and the need for cognitive legitimation required engagement with a multiethnic population that had been influenced by the history of British immigration prescriptions. In Scotland, British metropolitan scripts had been historically reproduced with Scottish inflections. Taken within the contemporary context of redressive legitimation, in creative ads both ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ citizens had to be portrayed as victims and perpetrators of ‘poor race relations’. Next, we shall illustrate how the need for legitimacy affects communicative content.

The campaign producers were confronted with a discrepancy between how different groups thought about racism and the need to promote ‘racism as a Scottish problem’. As a result, the ‘problem of racism’ was in the process of being defined according to the need for cognitive legitimation. Chris Eynon, then Managing Director of System Three, who carried out the market research on which the campaign was based, told me,¹⁴

The production of OSMC reveals that redressing past neglect risks losing cognitive legitimacy. Majority ethnic dissociation from the word ‘racism’ represented a rejectionist response to antiracist policy engagement. The campaign-makers were of the opinion that when ‘racism’ was used, its persuasive effect on the majority ethnic population was minimal. As Chris Wallace explained, a common theme from majority ethnic focus groups was, ‘I might have been abusive, but where's the harm in it? They hate us, I’m continuing my life, I don't let my kids play with their kids, we know where we stand’. By contrast, some minority ethnic focus group respondents wanted the campaign to send a ‘strident, finger pointing’ message. Straplines such as ‘No Place for Racism’ recognized and acknowledged minority ethnic resistance: State antiracist marketing was increasingly pushed to define ‘antiracism’ within the parameters of providing a solution to the problem of engaging with fragmented multiethnic constituencies. Despite the personal antiracist convictions of the campaign-makers, the representation of ‘racism’ included the implicit need to promote engagement with the devolved state as a force for tackling past neglect. In effect, the British metropolitan legitimacy-need to promote good ‘race relations’ was reframed and imported into the devolved polity's remit. Official antiracism would need to elicit cognitive consent by engaging with the contradictory concerns of multiethnic constituencies. The Ad-makers informed the Executive that ‘We think we can put racism on the map’, the problem was how to do so without alienating. As we shall demonstrate next, one of the core features of contemporary British state redress – dissociative therapeutics – came to inform the content of OSMC.

Legal prohibition/punishment, compensation, social and labour market activation are but some approaches that states might take towards racism. There is also a large body of literature which demonstrates the rejectionist power of ‘pro-hate’ (Chakraborti & Garland, 2014; Waltman, 2014), the psychological impact of racism on its targets (Chao, Longo, Wang, Dasgupta, & Fear, 2014; Nadal, Griffin, Wong, Hamit, & Rasmus, 2014) and consequent affective resistances (McElhinny, 2010; Ramos-Zayas, 2012). What is crucial here is that an affective ethos has been highlighted as a core feature of state redress in relation to the reestablishment of sovereignty in settler-colonial states. Humphrey (2005) argues that ‘the state, through affirming the self, has adopted the politics of “emotionology” as a new source of legitimacy’ (p. 206). This implies that political elites are unable/unwilling to implement significant change: ‘Public campaigns by the state to promote self-care and protection often mask its limited power or political will to either reduce risks or challenge structural inequality underlying conflict’ (p. 209). Working on different sides of the Atlantic, sociologists Nolan (1998) and Füredi (2004) have each drawn attention to an affective turn in social policy. The critical point is not that emotions remain unaffected or play no determinate role within social action, but that while a therapeutic cultural impulse has been tracked in the past, today ‘the cure’ is missing. Where previous psychologization included a transformative orientation, albeit within limits, current therapeutics erode abnormal/normal distinctions, which in turn promotes no solution or external orientation of transformation beyond the self. For the purposes of this paper, it is the legitimation impact of this transformative orientation in multiethnic metropoles that is of interest.¹⁵

The therapeutic turn resonates with developments in the official definition of institutional racism endorsed by the British state. The report of Sir Macpherson (1999) into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and the subsequent verdict that the Metropolitan Police is institutionally racist, was hailed as an antiracist victory. However as Hall (1999) and others pointed out at the time, ‘[t]hose expecting Macpherson to usher in a new epoch in black/police relations had … better think again’ (p. 196). Hall was keen to address ‘the stubborn persistence of racial thinking as part of the deep, unconscious structure of British common sense, often crystallized in institutional cultures’ (p. 189). To an extent, Macpherson recognized this unconscious structure in his definition: ‘[w]ithout recognition and action to eliminate such racism it can prevail as part of the ethos or culture of the organization. It is a corrosive disease’ (Macpherson, 1999, Ch. 6, Para.34). Institutional racism stemmed from a cultural ethos which rendered the perpetrator ‘unwitting’ of his/her actions. Consequently, a post-Macpherson accusation of institutional racism can translate into ‘not of the will of the perpetrator’. We should not here conclude that institutions could be held responsible either. Macpherson summed up as follows:

Moreover: As argued elsewhere (Kyriakides, 2008), the Macpherson definition of institutional racism redefined responsibility such that not only could an individual not be held to account but institutional responsibility was redefined, such that racist causation was determined by legacy of past action rather than present wilful culpability. This is very different to the concept of institutional racism once coined by black power advocates Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton (Kyriakides & Torres, 2012, pp. 97–98). In the new model, the unwitting perpetrator of racism is victimized by cultural forces which shape thought processes, precipitating action. The solution is ‘treatment’ through attitudinal change so that the individual agent is no longer susceptible to a ‘diseased’ cultural legacy. By this definition, neither perpetrator nor institution can be held responsible under liberal law. Perpetrators of actions who claim that they were compelled by external forces must be conferred a diminished capacity to act and, consequently, a diminished responsibility for said actions. There is erosion in the ‘normal/abnormal’ of racism. The ‘abnormality of racism’ is but the unconscious expression of a ‘normal’ ethos in a ‘racist culture’ and Macpherson posits no rational transformative solution beyond an ‘irrational’ self. In this definition the transformative discourse of rationality associated with liberalism is largely absent. As will be demonstrated next, Macpherson's circular definition of institutional racism as determined by a culture of inaction vis-à-vis eliminating the effect (i.e. the unwitting behaviour) of a racist cultural legacy, informed OSMC's art of persuasion. In this context, ‘Scotland’ substitutes metaphorically for ‘institution’. As Chris Wallace made clear during interview: I interpreted two of the TV/Cinema ads, one called Circle of Violence, the other Circle of Virtue, as follows:

The ad titles are congruent with the initial campaign problem of engaging fragmented constituencies and the need to ‘square the circle’ identified by Chris Wallace. He told me:

Pre-launch research had indicated that significant sections of the ethnic majority were not convinced racism was an issue that required their engagement. They did not see racism as a negative phenomenon and OSMC aimed to challenge their misperceptions In order to engage multiethnic constituencies, it was necessary to depict racism as harmful to the proponents: as a result of ‘unwittingness’, inter-ethnic conflict can escalate to the detriment of the proponent. Circle of Violence/Virtue aimed to educate proponents, but while the emotionally driven behavioural responses of the minority ethnic ad-characters are provoked and hence given justification, their position as a potentially problematic inter-ethnic presence is not disturbed. They too are potential victim–perpetrators in the inter-ethnic cycle of violence/virtue. The narrative is sealed by the closing OSMC caption and Scottish Executive logo, which signify the devolved polity's intervention as solution. The state is communicated as a neutral arbiter in social affairs. The campaign responded to and enlisted a cultural ‘race, immigration and integration’ script that is congruent with what we have termed, ‘affective multiethnic governance’. I discussed the influence of psychology, emotion and the concept of ‘unwittingness’ with Jackie Baillie: Moreover, if people did not develop their awareness of racism in Scotland there could be detrimental consequences: State actors and campaign-makers sought a positive development in tackling the social problem of racism and in promoting a desired ethnically diverse society. However, the process of multiethnic engagement in a local context where immigration regulation was reserved to Westminster, entailed that both problem and solution could only be defined within the historical and contemporary regulative prescriptions of the British metropolitan state. Despite the lower incidence of post-war migrant settlement in Scotland when compared with England, the British state's ‘race relations problematic’ had been reproduced in pre-devolution Scotland. Scottish neo-nationalism had not dislodged this dynamic. In presenting all actors as unwitting victim–perpetrators, the historical premise of metropolitan integration – that unregulated contact between ‘whites’ and ‘non-whites’ is potentially destabilizing – is framed within the contemporary arena of affective multiethnic governance. In this respect, OSMC represented both continuity and change.

These insights help clarify the message promoted in one of the OSMC radio ads, Sticks and Stones, which played as follows:

I interpreted the ad as follows:

OSMC operationalized an appeal, not to rational individualism, but to affective subjectivities increasingly recognized as the drivers of ethnic conflict. Two billboard ads from the campaign's 2004 second phase illustrate that the rise of official conceptualizations of racism under the rubric of affective governance can be understood, in part, as a reflection of what Reber (2012) calls the free-market episteme of affect. The first ad features an inflammable materials health and safety notice: the orange and black flame warns against ‘Inflammatory Behaviour’, reassuring us that ‘Scotland Works Better Without Racism’. The ad reframes the problem of ‘economic threat’, legitimized by UK immigration regulation, as a problem of inflamed emotions caused by and causing ethnic intolerance, the ‘work’ signifier perhaps playing to economic utility and Scottish labourism. The very existence of this billboard intervention signifies to the viewer that the state has a legitimate role to play as a regulative protective institution. The second ad features three pastel-coloured ‘love heart’ sweets, each inscribed with the words ‘RESPECT’, ‘FAIRNESS’, ‘EQUALITY’. The launch of the second phase represented the state's strategy of stepping up its antiracist message. Analytically it reflected the incorporation of an affective understanding of racism in antiracist policy, and consequently in the communicative art of persuasion. The state requests our trust in its endeavour to keep us safe from the possibility that our disaffection may lead us ‘unwittingly’ to cause harm. The message is clear: the management of potentially explosive racialized emotion is essential if we are to ensure multicultural national unity, especially where the racially conflict-prone come into contact. Cognitive and institutional legitimacy are paired.

New Labour's One Scotland, Many Cultures campaign ended in 2007 with the coming to power of the Scottish National Party (SNP) whose independence drive and resulting referendum have been executed under a Westminster framework governed by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat (Con-Lib) coalition since 2010. Opinion differs as to whether or not subsequent SNP governments have impacted negatively or positively on equality (Camp-Pietrain, 2014; Penrose & Howard, 2008), and such challenging legitimation conditions can only be addressed tentatively here, but it is clear that affective governance is a legitimation technique that continues to have purchase on policy interventions related to racism, immigration and citizenship.

Prior to its departure from government, New Labour at times de-emphasised ‘Many Cultures’ in its campaign title, instead adopting the shortened title, One Scotland in subsequent campaign phases. New ‘no place for racism’ billboard ads and policy publications related to ‘religious sectarianism’ were issued, by New Labour, under the One Scotland logo.¹⁶ The SNP government has since institutionalized its own particular One Scotland brand across the pre- and post-referendum divide.¹⁷ Yet commentators seldom notice that OSMC under New Labour reproduced some of the key defining features of Clinton's One America (Kim, 2000) in which the representation of national culture superseded that of any particular ethnic group. But more importantly, the Clinton administration depoliticized antiracism by defining ‘racism’ as dialogic hate-producing-hate (Kyriakides, 2012), and while the notion of ‘many cultures’ continues to appear intermittently in Scottish government policy documents and beyond, its gradual omission from the campaign's master narrative suggests both the continuation and consolidation of antiracism within an affective equalities framework which is not confined to Scotland. Recognizing the targets of ‘hate’ – a negative emotion that is not specific either to ‘racism’ or to any particular ethnic group – corresponded with subsequent anti-sectarianism and pro-asylum initiatives (Lugo-Ocando, 2011).

The SNP's Threatening Communications Act 2012 followed New Labour's pledge to ‘put sectarian attitudes into the dustbin of history’ so that ‘we can all contribute to the one Scotland of many cultures we aspire to’.¹⁸ Protestant-Catholic rivalry in Scotland has included the historical racialization of Irish Catholics (Kyriakides & Torres, 2012, Chapter 2) and anti-Irish Catholic mobilization (Vaughan, 2013), but according to Waiton (2013) recognition was ‘less about politics or religion than it was a form of therapeutic protection’ (p. 106). While sectarianism was classified as hate crime in 2003, the SNP has, since 2007, cultivated a symbiotic definition of ‘racism and sectarianism’. Former First Minister Alex Salmond framed ‘the problem’, post-Macpherson, as psycho-cultural disease: a ‘parasite’ to be ‘eradicated’: sectarianism ‘has no place in Scotland’ (Action to Tackle Hate Crime and Sectarianism, BBC online, 25 May 2011).¹⁹ The government's £9-million Tackling Sectarianism Fund, 2012/15, engages ‘hatred’ (which flourishes due to inadequate past actions) so as to ‘improve the lives of those from minority ethnic and religious backgrounds’ (Scottish Government 2014). Race and religion are emotionalized; ‘racism’ conceptualized as dangerous emotion. Where New Labour's OSMC recognized disaffected identities for state redress, the SNP requests citizen identification with a future Scottish state dissociated from the ‘past colonial injustices’ of the British state. Either way, urging that ‘good citizens’ should not stir hatred, frames governance. Affective multiethnic governance engages local constituencies.

This is a seductive strategy that, when applied to immigration regulation, partly resurrects the ghost of Hattersley's ‘racial integration/limitation’, now legitimizing intervention so as to limit conflict between emotionalized ethnic groups. A complementary logic, initially developed under Blair's New Labour, is that immigration should be ‘managed’ so as to ‘protect’ migrants from the hatred that their presence in sufficient numbers may stir, especially those settling among low-skilled groups (see Kyriakides, 2008 for a discussion). The SNP's pledge to increase immigration ‘due to insufficient numbers in Scotland’ does not challenge the affective logic that immigration is a ‘potential problem of hate regulation’. The Scottish government's New Scots: Integrating Refugees in Scotland's Communities Action Plan 2014–2017 leaves the policy concern ‘How many is too many for successful integration?’ intact. An optimum but elusive number of migrants should be managed so as to ensure ‘unity in diversity’.

The 2014 referendum result may or may not suggest greater identification with the British state than with Scottish independence. Arguably, the UK government's recognition of the Scottish referendum was a risky bid to undercut a delegitimation movement.²⁰ As leader of the UK opposition in 2006, David Cameron publicly apologized to Scotland, not only for Thatcher government policies, but for not respecting the ‘settled will of the people’ on devolution (Telegraph, 2006). As Prime Minister, dissociating himself from the Conservative's record of ‘past neglect’ courted affection with the maxim that Yes or No was an ‘argument of the heart’ (cited in Watt, 2014). The SNP's affective appeal at referendum was in the end insufficient. A bid to enlist the pro-union Labour Party's traditional but disaffected Irish Catholic constituency, characterized as the ‘SNP's wooing of an ethnic enclave’, may have galvanized the British unionists’ allegiance of disaffected Protestants (Gallagher, 2014). Immigration and border security did figure as pre-referendum issues (Chorely, 2014) and the Con-Lib pledge to reduce immigration had been a sustained Westminster message with which many Scots agreed. One pre-referendum survey found that 58% supported a reduction in immigration to Scotland (Blinder, 2014), prompting comment that ‘The majority of Scots do not support the SNP's policy – and indeed, the approach of all of Scotland's parties – towards increasing levels of immigration’ (Hepburn, 2014). The affective validation that UK-wide regulation brings to metropolitan citizenship is reproduced in Scotland.

The belief that Scotland is an oppressed nation under British rule resonates with some racialized minorities (see Global Post, 2014). Scottishness carries considerable intellectual and cultural weight (Ascherson, 2004) and a significant proportion of racialized minorities identify with ‘multicultural nationalism’ and the SNP (Hussein & Miller, 2006). However, Netto (2008) has argued that ‘Minority ethnic communities’ ability to claim interpretive space in the public arena is crucially dependent on the extent to which their claims to evolving representations of national culture are recognized within a wider drive to promote separate nationhood’ (p. 47). Pre-referendum studies also found a significant anti-Yes stance among minority ethnic young people who voiced ‘concern that those who were pro-independence were doing so based on emotions and patriotism’ (Arshad, Botterill, Hopkins, & Sanghera, 2014, p. 5). Racialized minorities are not automatically predisposed, by virtue of historical experience, to either a pro or an anti-nationalist stance.

Scottish exceptionalism can hide influential factors not specific to Scotland. An emerging academic discourse challenges the ‘collective amnesia’ reproduced by Scottish imperial denial and notions of Scottish victimhood. Re-imagined within Pocock's (2005) Atlantic archipelago, the salience of Scotland's imperial past is acknowledged and reconciled with independence against exclusionary British nationalism (Morris, 2014). Yet the extent to which historical recognition can break contemporary geopolitical codes of cultural belonging and ethnic realignments operationalized through border control is questionable. A transatlantic security ethos (Kyriakides & Torres, 2015) has influenced the propensity of some racialized minorities in Scotland and in England to positively self-differentiate against ‘new migrants’ (Kyriakides, Virdee, & Modood, 2009). Moreover, one of the key pre-referendum pledges was that an independent Scotland would remain within what some pro-immigration advocates refer to as ‘Fortress Europe’. It is not inconceivable that a selective yet imagined ‘multicultural’ community of affected identities could translate ‘immigration fears’ into politically legitimized border protection. Given the salience of ‘affective multiethnic governance’ as a feature of metropolitan legitimation, it is likely that states, devolved or otherwise, will continue to engage both ‘pro-hate’ rejectionists and ‘anti-hate’ resistances.

This study proposed a political sociology of ethnicity and communication, centralizing migration ‘integration’ policy so as to better situate the analytical relationship between the postcolonial metropolitan migration regulation nexus and antiracist political communication. Our chosen empirical case of state-backed social marketing communication was premised on the understanding that the political need to connect – the process of legitimation – seeks novel avenues through which the state-citizen relation can be recast. The choice of legitimation method need not be interpreted as either Machiavellian or arbitrary. It is intrinsically linked to a perceived legitimacy deficit. A state-initiated antiracist social marketing communication campaign can take the political form of affective multiethnic governance because ultimately ‘the State’ must be communicated as a legitimate arbiter in social affairs. Grounding our analysis historically within the post-war statal regulation of colony-to-metropolis migration brings the method into a designated high-priority policy area for the British and other states more widely: the need to promote ‘unity in diversity’ amid what is seen as a particular historical problem of social order – the metropolitan settlement and reception of ex-colonial racialized migrant minorities and their descendants – in an era of declining legitimacy. Affective redress is not specific to Scotland or to particular administrations. Our study of official antiracism demonstrates that legitimation techniques attempt to redress, connect and engage citizen loyalty. We are not arguing here that racism and ethnic denigration do not affect people psychologically, or that emotions play no role within conflict. But we are drawing attention to the fact that the ‘therapeutic’ State must legitimize itself (institutionally and cognitively) as neutral arbiter, and, in the process, both problem and solution are redefined via the communicative orbit of persuasion such that the postcolonial legacy of migrant-host relations is reconfigured within a framework of affective governance.

I would like to thank Rodolfo Torres, Aaron Winter, Stuart Waiton, Fernando Mendez and William Takamatsu Thompson for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this manuscript. I would also like to thank the Editors of EJCPS and the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. Interview material cited in this paper is drawn from work originally funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, reference PTA-030-2002-01352. I would like to acknowledge and thank Satnam Virdee for his supervision of the original study. Although it has been over 10 years since these interviews were conducted, it is a testament to each interviewee's contribution to OSMC that we are still able to learn from their words. I would like to extend my gratitude to them for giving so graciously of their time, without which this study would not have been possible.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.