Abstract
The rhetoric of hostility is a ubiquitous feature of politics and government. But the ways in which enemies are described, the nature of the perceived and alleged threats, the identification of enemies, the identity of the enmity narrator, and the context and consequences of narration, all differ widely. To say that enmity is a recurring feature of political life tells us only in the very broadest terms what to expect. It indicates a range of possibilities, but within that range an eclectic variety is all we can predict. Up to this point of the discussion, I have spoken of enmity and enemies as a single broad type, and discussed the various accounts of enmity in relation to this comprehensive category. But it is now both possible and desirable to make the discussion more precise, in order to distinguish the many points on a scale which can run from murderous calls for extermination, to restrained and civil competition in parliamentary politics.
‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!’1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (London: Collins, 1954 [1872]), p. 152.
Quoted in Mark Knight, ‘Faults on Both Sides: the Conspiracies of Party Politics under the Later Stuarts’, in Barry Coward and Julian Swann (eds), Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 157.
David F. Epstein, Personal Enmity in Roman Politics, 218–43 BC. (London: Croom Helm, 1987), p. 1.
Christopher Browning and Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: the Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy1939–42 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), p. 10.
David J. Finlay, Ole R. Holsti, and Richard R. Fagen, Enemies in Politics (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967), p. 7.
Siân Nicholas, The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939–49 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 149.
Heinrich Mann, 1933, quoted in Matthew Stibbe, German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 2.
Matthew Stibbe, German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 11–12.
Fred Halliday, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East, 2nd edition (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), p. 171.
John Gallagher and Chris Bull, Perfect Enemies: the Religious Right, the Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990s (New York: Crown Publishers Inc., 1996).
Jonathan Fox and Sandler Shmuel suggest that whilst liberal democratic pluralism discourages discrimination against ethnic minorities, religious groups can have beliefs which challenge liberal pluralism, and are thus more of a threat to liberal democracy which is secular, than to semi-democracies which are not necessarily so. Jonathan Fox and Sandler Shmuel, ‘Regime Types and Discrimination against Ethnoreligious Minorities: a Cross-Sectional Analysis of the Autocracy-Democracy Continuum’, Political Studies, 51, 3, October (2003), pp. 469–89.
Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts: a Global History (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).
Stuart Clark, ‘Introduction’, in Stuart Clark (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 10.
David Margolick, Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), p. 158.
Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: a Biography (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), p. 589.
Ian Buruma, ‘The Indiscreet Charm of Tyranny’, New York Review of Books, 52, 8, 12 May (2005), p. 35.
Yorkshire Post, 28 July 1984, quoted in John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher. Volume II: the Iron Lady (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003), p. 361.
Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 18.
Speech to the Senate on 20 February 1950, in Joseph McCarthy, Major Speeches and Debates of Senator Joe McCarthy Delivered in the United States Senate, 1950–1951 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1951), p. 8,
quoted in Seymour J. Mandelbaum, The Social Setting of Intolerance: the Know-Nothings, the Red Scare, and McCarthyism (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1964), pp. 142–3.
Sir John Harington, Epigrams (1618), book 4, number 5, quoted in Angela Partington (ed.), The Dictionary of Quotations, 4th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 326, 12.
C. A. R. Crosland, The Conservative Enemy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962).
Quoted in Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-Terrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 170.
George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin (1970 Penguin edn) 1968), p. 95.
Quoted in Robert Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within: the Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 31.
By the end of the twentieth century such attacks, like political messages as a whole, could be transmitted with speed and ease via the internet. http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa110399.htm, accessed 27 May 2006. The evidence, and narratives, of such phenomena are frequently elusive. See, for instance, Mary Hershberger, Jane Fonda’s War: a Political Biography of an Anti-War Icon (New York: New Press, 2005);
Rick Perlstein, ‘Operation Barbarella’, London Review of Books, 27, 2, 17 November (2005), pp. 3–6.
Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: the Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties (London: Gibson Square, 2004).
Simon Haxey, Tory M.P. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939), p. 245.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 192.
Gilles Kepel, Jihad: the Trail of Political Islam, translated by Anthony F. Roberts (London: Tauris, 2002).
George Simmel, Conflict & the Web of Group-Affiliations, translated by Kurt H. Wolff and Reinhard Bendix (New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 43.
Tom Gallagher, Glasgow: the Uneasy Peace (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 17.
Giles Radice, Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins and Healey (London: Abacus, 2003), p. 132.
Bernard Donoughue and G. W. Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973).
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Raids and Reconstructions: Essays in Politics, Crime and Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1973), p. 61.
George Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception: an Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt between1921 and 1936, 2nd edition (Berlin: Greenwood Press, 1970), pp. 53–4.
Giovanni Sartori, ‘The Essence of the Political in Carl Schmitt’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 1, 1, January (1989), pp. 63–75.
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and other Essays (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 244–6, 420–1, and passim.
Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Europe, translated by Janet Lloyd (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 84.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2007 Rodney Barker
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Barker, R. (2007). Patterns of Enmity: Varieties of Narrative. In: Making Enemies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287532_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287532_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35464-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-28753-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)