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What happens when governments deny racism exists?
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Britain, apparently, does not have a problem with racism. The millions of Britons who experience racial slurs; discrimination at school; unequal access to jobs, housing and public services; and who are made to feel unwelcome in their own neighbourhoods will have been relieved to read in Tony Sewell’s report, commissioned by Boris Johnson last summer and published in March 2021, that the “UK has fundamentally shifted since those periods in the past and has become a more open society.”

As we continue to process the implications of the Sewell Report, it is helpful to remember other societies that apparently also did not have problems with racism.

Denying that one’s country is racist was particularly common in Europe between the wars. In East and Central Europe, one government after another insisted that they were looking after their minorities even while they were introducing discriminatory social structures and policies explicitly designed to benefit the majority populations. Doing so fuelled the growth of radical-Right parties and encouraged vigilante violence against minorities, and in some instances allowed fascists or right-wing authoritarians to overthrow the very governments that introduced these policies in the first place.

The countries that had the most to gain from denying that racism was a problem were those that had been newly created or dramatically expanded after the great continental empires collapsed at the end of the First World War, such as Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.

Poland for the Poles

Poland, for example, had been a large and prosperous medieval commonwealth but was divided between the Prussian, Russian and Habsburg empires in the late 18th century. When it was re-created as a nation-state in 1918, it inherited three different currencies, legal systems, transportation systems and education systems, along with a host of ethnic minorities, among them Germans who had enjoyed dominant positions in the old empires but now found themselves playing second fiddle to the Poles.

With the racist paternalism common among Western Europeans at the time, the economist John Maynard Keynes called the creation of modern Poland “an economic impossibility, whose only industry is Jew-baiting”, and British prime minister Lloyd George said he “would rather give a clock to a monkey” than give Upper Silesia to Poland.

In addition to the breath-taking challenge of building a new state out of the ashes of war, European statesmen worried that the Poles, who had been an oppressed minority for well over a century, would in turn discriminate against anyone who wasn’t Polish once they were in charge.

Led by Great Britain and France, the Great Powers forced them to sign a Minorities Treaty, which allowed the League of Nations to interfere in Polish affairs if it was found that minority populations were not enjoying equal rights.

Jewish people in Poland nonetheless reported frequent discrimination, including not being allowed to run their own schools and being violently persecuted by other students at universities. Ukrainian nationalists organised a violent campaign against the Polish state, only to face mass arrests and the “pacification” of more than 450 villages by policemen who turned houses inside out looking for weapons and potential trouble-makers.

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/what-happens-when-governments-deny-racism-exists/