Alternatives: Global, Local, Political

37(3) 266-281
European Trauma: Governance The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
and the Psychological Moment DOI: 10.1177/0304375412452050
http://alt.sagepub.com

Catarina Kinnvall1

Abstract
This article examines the unfolding of traumas as structural and sociopsychological narratives
focused on the bordering of identity and the governing of past present and future. Proceeding from a
Lacanian conception of trauma and a Foucauldian understanding of governmentality, the analysis is
centered on hegemonic counternarratives, even crises, involving the bordering of both Islam/
Muslim identity and Europe/national identity. This European trauma, or psychological moment,
is exemplified through events in London 2005 and Norway 2011. It is perceived in terms of
Chosen Traumas and Chosen Glories, the mythologization of past events that are retold, rein-
vented, and awarded new meanings in the present. Such traumas and glories can create a foun-
dation for governing practices in which hegemonic interpretations of identity turn into normalizing
narratives that justify violence. However, the governing of narratives is a contested process and
alternative narrative understandings in terms of everyday practices can stimulate social resistance
and psychological resilience, eventually challenging the normalizing bordering processes
encountered in Europe today.

Keywords
Europe, trauma, Lacan, governance, narrative, Breivik, 7/7

Introduction
The summer day was turning into late afternoon on July 22, 2011, when the first news of a massacre
in Norway reached the headlines. A bomb has exploded in Oslo and young people are being shot on
some islandthe urgent Norwegian voice was trying to grasp a reality that seemed too far-fetched
to be true. The unfathomable fact that one person, Anders Behring Breivik, born and bred in Norway,
was behind it all was overwhelming. His rage against Marxism, multiculturalism, feminism, Islam,
and diversity, all of which had become enmeshed into some threat against Norway and the borders of
Norwegian identity, justified a world worth killing for. His solution for curing what he saw as the ills
of multicultural Norway, the emergence of Eurabia, included ending the lives of government
workers and the children of the Norwegian social democratic elite. Together these killings, in total

1
Department of Political Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Corresponding Author:
Catarina Kinnvall, Department of Political Science, Lund University, Box 52, 221 00 Lund, Sweden
Email: catarina.kinnvall@svet.lu.se
Kinnvall 267

77, constituted the opening ceremony of a religious crusade against what Breivik perceived as
the creeping Islamification of Western Europe. His plan was laid down in his manifesto, 2083:
A European Declaration of Independence where the year 2083 marked the 400 years elapsing since
the Battle of Vienna and supposedly signaling the time when Breivik was convinced the civil war he
hoped to start would be over.
Watching the direct coverage of the event and the ceremony held for the victims shortly afterward
brought back memories of a summer morning a few years earlier when on July 7, 2005, a series of
bombs went off in London. The attacks by four suicide bombers killed 52 people and injured more
than 700 when they hit the London Underground and a bus in Tavistock Square. A shocked Britain
had to confront the horrific fact that young men grown up in Britain had used their own bodies to
create the carnage. The video made by one of the perpetrators, Mohammad Sidique Khan, and the
will and testament found by the police after the bombings, talked about avenging his brothers and
sisters in response to the Western worlds elected governments continuing perpetuation of atrocities
all over the world. The narrative he was conveying was one of being at war and being a soldier
destined to confront the injustices carried out by the West against Muslims everywhere. Unlike
Breivik, the driving motivation was described as coming from a life beyond earthly existence, but
the perceived end result had uncanny parallels with Breiviks claims to be a soldier and a crusader of
a mythic past and a recreator of a European future without Muslims, except that Khan described a
world in which the West had been conquered and replaced by the Caliphate.
This article takes these two events as its point of departure. I argue that these events together con-
stitute an ongoing European trauma that is being narrated as hegemonic counter-stories, even crises,
involving the bordering of Europe and national identity on one hand and the bordering of Islam and
Muslim identity on the other, leaving alternative narratives struggling for attention. Proceeding from
a Lacanian understanding of trauma as being both outside our experience and psychologically debil-
itating, my argument is that the governing (in a Foucauldian sense) of this trauma affects individuals
and groups as the search for security is exploited and normalized into exclusionary positioning.
In order to depict this European trauma in narrative terms, the article starts by outlining a number
of related stories that have occurred in Europe. These stories constitute examples of continuous
counterpositioning and take the shape of psychological moments (in terms of narrative plots) con-
firming a certain narrative order within which to understand the notion of an ongoing European
trauma. The outlining of these stories as counternarratives is followed by a discussion of how
we conceptualize trauma and traumatic events as well as the particular notion of a European
trauma. It is specifically European I argue, not because it occurs in a geographical (or substanti-
alist) understanding of Europe,1 but because it relies on contesting ideas of a symbolic space
bordered by shared stories, which have produced hegemonic narratives about the nation, the
national and Europe at the same time as it has relied upon narratives of imaginary others; the out-
siders, the colonial, and the marginalized. These narratives are increasingly bordered and rebor-
dered in response to transnational and global discourses on security and identity. The article
then moves on to consider how these counternarratives are bordered through the representation
of shared experiences, real or imaginedso-called Chosen Traumas and Chosen Gloriesand
how such bordering is governed through the institutionalization of exclusionary positioning, thus
constituting what can be described as a chronic European Trauma.

The Stories
The first story is set in Germany and illustrates the scale to which narratives of Islamophobia have
become embedded in government and community. The case is that of Marwa El-Sherbini, a thirty-
one-year-old mother of a three-year-old son and pregnant with her second child, who was killed by a
GermanRussian man on June 7, 2009. The entire tragedy began with a small request made by
268 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 37(3)

Marwa El-Sherbini to allow her son to sit on a swing in a playground. The man responded by insult-
ing her as a terrorist and an Islamist whore because of her headscarf. Mrs. Sherbini sued him
and a court awarded her a 750 euro settlement. The man appealed the verdict and the entire
El-Sherbini family was present at the court during the hearing when the man attacked Marwa
El-Sherbini in the courtroom with a knife and stabbed her 18 times. Her husbands attempt to save
her was interrupted by a court policeman, who claimed to have mistaken him for the attacker, shot
and critically wounded the husband. The killing of Marwa El-Sherbani and the shooting of her hus-
band was not likely to have been directly influenced by a speech denouncing the burka and demo-
nizing Muslims given by Nicolas Sarkozy a few days earlier, but both represent part of a broader
narrative trend of European bigotry and hostility against Islam and Muslims.2
A second story is told by psychology Professor Thomas Scheff3 and refers to a chance encounter
at a memorial to soldiers killed in the Iraq war where the father of a soldier who had died was show-
ing childhood pictures of his son. These pictures made Scheff (Me) start to cry.

Father (surprised): Whats the matter?

Me: I was wondering if the war in Iraq is worth the death of your son.
Father: (Again surprised). But we had to do something.
Me: Why is that?
Father: 9/11.
Me: But Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
Father: Well, theyre all Muslims.

The response of the father suggests how traumatic experiences are internalized into self-other per-
ceptions that have consequences for both majority and minority communities. As stories, they
could be joined by many others involving an increased focus on Islam and Muslims in which some
people become active participants in a narrative on terror involving the bordering of national and/
or European identity.
Another set of stories concern the bordering of Islam and Muslim identity. On December 11,
2010, twenty-eight-year-old Taimour Abdulwahab blew himself up on the streets of Stockholm.
He had moved to Sweden from Iraq as a ten-year-old and his family had settled in the Southern part
of Sweden. Prior to setting off the bomb, Abdulwahab had spent several years as a student in Luton,
UK, a town that has often been described as a hotbed for extreme Islam, not least because of the fact
that the 2005 London bombers gathered there before setting off on their paths to martyrdom. He
had also spent time in the Middle East receiving military and ideological training in what has been
described as al Qaida camps. In the sound files he left behind, he talked about the Swedish artist Lars
Vilks portrayal of Mohammed as a dog and the wars in Afghanistan as motivating factors.4 Not long
thereafter, on December 29, 2010, five men from Sweden and Denmark were arrested on suspicion
of planning to blow up Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that published the infamous caricatures of
Mohammed that led to protests against Denmark all over the world. One of the suspects had previ-
ously been arrested in Pakistan and extradited to Sweden on charges of joint training with Taliban
groups. In telephone conversations, the suspects were allegedly talking about killing as many as
possible, cutting their throats, and carrying out a Mumbai-style attack.5
These counternarratives cannot be grasped within the boundaries of state borders. Instead, they
must be read as transnational narratives that are formed in response to global discourses on security
and identity and only convey meaning in relation to hegemonic narratives of national and European
identity on one hand and Islam and Muslim identity on the other. As narratives, they refer to and
include second- or third-generation Muslim minorities residing in Europe today, so-called post-
diasporic Muslims,6 and they become narrative plots in a European trauma in which the politics
of fear and despair is mutually interwoven. Not only is this trauma governed by the proliferation
Kinnvall 269

of neo-nationalist movements that have popularized this fear in xenophobic politics and in a longing
for mythic nations, but it is equally governed by Islamic narratives focused on Western imperialism
and the reestablishment of the Caliphate.

Trauma and Traumatic Events

What happened in Norway and London are both examples of events in terms of extraordinary
occurrences, something beyond our everyday experience. As such, they signify experiences that
are so shocking that they disrupt our previous understandings of how the world is constituted
they fully disturb our sense of ontological security, our security of being, thus heightening levels
of existential anxiety.7 They constitute, in other words, traumatic events. Both events were fol-
lowed by expressions of disbelief, astonishment, doubt, and incredulity, not least manifest in the
repeating images of chaos and destruction as people walked or were carried away from the blasts
with blank faces and visible injuries or the horrific pictures of youth attempting to escape a pre-
fabricated destiny on a green island. As traumatic events, they were not unlike the repeated
screening of the planes flying into the twin towers and the towers collapsing in the days following
September 11. These kinds of repetitions are said to be symptomatic of traumatic experiences. For
psychoanalysis, every memory is also a form of repetition, which implies that any attempt to cir-
cumscribe history within a narrative misses the unconscious, traumatic compulsion to repeat.8
Hence, a Lacanian definition of trauma describes it as both an event (or several events) outside
the range of human experience and a possible collapse of inner psychological structures or frag-
mentation occurring sometime after the event, in which inner vitality, harmony, and cohesion of
the self is undermined.9 It is the belief in a coherent self rather than the existence of such a self that
is in focus here.
For those barely surviving the attacks, trauma clearly contained both elements. The unspeakable
horror that hit those young men and women in Norway who trustfully gathered around the appre-
hending police officer, only to be shot at was beyond imagination. The deferral of the trauma
in terms of a psychological collapse of inner structures was equally visible. The fact that many of
the young survivors of the Utya massacre have been unable to return to school to continue a life
like before has been symptomatic of the struggle to come to terms with a world turned upside-
down.10 Similarly, those submerging into the London Underground only to stumble up a few hours
latertheir eyes witness to the unseencould not have predicted this disaster. Reexperiencing the
horrors, if only through images and memories, have for many interrupted a sense of everyday trust
and resulted in experiences of posttraumatic stress disorder.11 Posttraumatic stress disorder is not a
disease or an illness, however, but simply reflects our inability to allocate meaning to the event.12
Trauma exposure can cause a rupture and can bring about a state of being stuck in the fixity of the
trauma. This state is often exacerbated by societys initial emotional outburst in reaction to the trau-
matic event, followed by a demand to return to normality.13
In psychoanalytic terminology, trauma thus exceeds representation as it is a shock that the sub-
jects are unable to register: a traumatic intrusion of the absolute present, what Lacan calls an
encounter with the real.14 To Lacan, the Real is that to which we do not have access and its dis-
appearance from the field of consciousness constitutes a condition for intersubjectivity as the trauma
needs to be recounted to somebody else, a listener, as an attempt to come to terms with the unspeak-
able. What happened didnt happen to them. They are removed from it.15 When speaking about a
trauma as outside of human experience, it is this inability to represent the trauma that accounts for its
horror. The trauma returns as a symptom in a disguised or distorted form. Hence, the symptom is a
repetition of the trauma, but a repetition with a difference. Memory is causal of later behavior, in
the sense of giving rise to a chain of repetitions, but it only becomes causal as it is (mis)interpreted in
the light of later experience.16
270 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 37(3)

In this regard, it is important to differentiate between the personal suffering of those directly
affected by a traumatic event and the experience of such an event through media or other sources
of communication.17 But even when not self-experienced, traumatic events can take the shape
of an external rupture that shakes our fundamental views of the worlda sense that nothing will
ever be the same again, that there is no way of going back to normal. The trauma is repeated
through narrative accounts of the events, thus perpetuating a feeling that the trauma never left.
Many spoke after the Norwegian massacre about the loss of innocence, of national grief,
or in the words of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg; the bullets hit our young, but they also struck
an entire nation.18 Similarly, Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, spoke at a memorial
service; Five years ago today, the people of London were subjected to an appalling terrorist
attack. 52 people were killed and many more were injured, physically and mentally, by the out-
rage. It was an attack on our capital and on our whole country.19 This re-telling of the trauma
is what brings together the imaginary dimension of the unconscious with the sociosymbolic order
affected by asymmetric relations and structures of power.20 Subjectivity contains both psychic and
social realities. Hence, the retelling of the trauma as a collective experience also exerts influence
on the psychological level in terms of disrupting a sense of self, a fragmentation of subjectivity,
resulting in a search for a new kind of security, a new normality at the personal, interpersonal,
societal, national, and international levels.21
As a collective process, it often includes attempts to securitize subjectivity.22 The securitiza-
tion of subjectivity is a process that seeks to build walls of ontological security around the self
through the refusal to permit ambiguity or problematization in cultures or social structures. To avoid
psychological reductionism or essentialist readings of this process, it should be emphasized that
securitizing subjectivity is both a psychological and a structural process. For some of those whose
lives have been traumatized through specific events, the rebuilding of a world in which identity is
single and uniform can seem very seductive. Trauma in terms of victimization can thus result in
ideological distortion and unconscious defenses manifest in simple categorization of right and
wrong, us and them. This experience as victims of an arbitrary assault, Hollander argues, is what
made it possible for the American government in the wake of September 11 to gain support for its
aggressive retaliatory policies.23 The emerging discourse surrounding this event took the shape of
a moralizing rhetoric of good and evil, us and them, friend and foe, right and wrong, a war in which
both protagonists have God on their side.24 Hence, September 11 set the stage for the years to come
in which terror discourses and counterterrorist activities would interact with this search for security.
It was narrated as a collective trauma that on a political level became preoccupied with quick fixes,
with securitizing the sovereign state and the domestic sphere in the face of its disintegration. As a
result, we came to witness an increase in domestic restrictions on migration and a demand for sur-
veillance of Muslim communities, not least evident in the new anti-terrorist legislation passed in
country after country.
The killing of Marwa El-Sherbini and the assault on her husband took place within this precon-
structed securitized narrative in which she was considered not only an enemy within, but also, and
more importantly, a threat to the notion of Europeanness itself simply through her visibility as a
Muslim. The story of the father of the killed soldier is similarly a repetition of the traumatic effects
of September 11, manifest in simplified categorizations of Muslims as suicide bombers and evil
imams. Through these narrative plots, discourses on the limits of cultural diversity25 become inti-
mately linked to discourses on terror and serve as acts in a theatrical spectacle that create stories and
counter-stories. As stories, they take the shape of narrative engagement,26 which describes how
members of a society engage with collective stories of what it means to inhabit a particular political
entity, be it a nation-state, a resistance movement, or a political party. These stories are governed by
fear and retold as linked hegemonic histories in which Europeanness, and the threat to such a
notion, is being reexperienced and reacted upon among majority and Muslim minority communities.
Kinnvall 271

The governing of fear and insecurity functions as a field of domination in relation to other fields,27 as
actors and institutions struggle to monopolize the power to define legitimately recognized threats.

The Idea of Europe

The stories recounted in a European context cannot be understood apart from this trauma of Septem-
ber 11, but they also predate it. As the postwar immigrants settled in Europe and started families, so
the politics of class- and gender-conditioned ethnoracial politics emerged, eventuated from a series
of deep political challenges associated with the emergence of Islam in the European imaginary.
Given the historical legacy of colonialism and associated patterns of racism and xenophobia, the
integration of new immigrants in Europe has been difficult, not least in those host societies that
had been self-defined as monocultural or politically acultural. Stripped of historical and dialectical
roots, the development of minority neighborhoods came to be regarded as natural processes of
racial differentiation rather than the result of economic and social disadvantages.28 In postcolonial
Lacanian psychoanalysis, such naturalization was part of the colonial reproduction of identities as
a process of imaginary identification,29 in which colonizers and the colonized were reproduced,
modified, and changed in relation to each other. The civilized, enlightened rational Europeans
identity could not be imagined apart from the barbaric, uninformed, and irrational Otherthe
non-European colonized people.30
This European imaginary lives on not only as institutional practices in postcolonial societies but
as unequal power relations in European societies.31 The postcolonial has moved into Europe and is
challenging European societies from within. Confronted by racism, cultural denigration, and Islamo-
phobia, some young Muslims see the events in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, and Palestine as yet
another form of imperialism and colonialism, while others (often young white men) long for the
time when Europe and their particular nations were sovereign and free from cultural infection.
It would be easy to explain away the acts of Breivik as the work of a mad man, a lunatic, and perhaps
increasingly so after a psychiatric report that diagnosed him as mentally ill was released. However,
that fails to conceptualize how a nostalgic idea of Europe is currently gaining force throughout the
continent. This Europe is white and predominantly secular (disregarding much religious heritage and
influence). It consists of autonomous nations in which an imagined ethnos preside over an equally
imagined territorial space.32 It thrives on an anti-immigrant language but is particularly focused on
Islam and Muslims. It generally shares a mistrust of globalization, the EU and other forms of supra-
national interference that is believed to restrict national sovereignty. Breiviks world is one governed
by conspiracy theories in which there is a silent agreement between the Western world and oil-
producing countries that oil can be bought in exchange for massive immigration and the eventual
formation of a Eurabia. Those responsible for this emerging world are socialists, Marxists, multicul-
turalists, and feminists, what Breivik calls the New Totalitarians who are allowing millions of
Muslims to colonize Europe.33 This anti-Muslim ideology expressed in a hodge-podge fashion in
Breiviks Declaration must be set in terms of a larger ideological narrative focused on Islam,
Muslims, and immigrants as exemplified throughout Europe.
In Denmark, the focus has been on how all immigrants who commit a crime are to be extradited;
in the Netherlands, the rhetoric has centered on more restrictive naturalization policies; in Finland,
the party The True Finns, who strive to keep cultural groups separate, gained almost 20 percent of
the votes in the last election; in France, the new leader of the far right-wing party Front National,
Marine Le Pen, was expected to win the first round of the presidential election in 2012; in Sweden, a
man was arrested for shooting immigrants, corresponding with the rise of the right-wing party, the
Sweden Democrats. The list could be made longer, but it is sufficient to show an increasing preoc-
cupation with a new nationalism sweeping Europe in which Muslims are being portrayed as alien
272 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 37(3)

to the self-definition of the nation. As expressed in the words of Pia Kjrsgaard, the leader of the
Danish Peoples Party:

Not in their wildest imaginations would anyone [in 1900] have imagined, that large parts of Copenhagen
and other Danish towns would be populated by people who are at a lower stage of civilization, with their
own primitive and cruel customs like honor killings, forced marriages, halal slaughtering and blood
feuds. This is exactly what is happening now. Thousands upon thousands of persons, who appar-
entlycivilizationally, culturally, and spirituallylive in the year of 1005 instead of 2005, have come
to a country [Denmark] that left the dark ages hundreds of years ago.34

As van der Veer35 has forcefully argued, our imaginary identifications are already positioned, where
Muslims the old rival of the West are labeled fanatic and bigoted while Westerners are seen in a
more positive light as tolerant. Hence, there is no subject without it arising in the speech of the Other.
This split subjectivity lends itself to the decentering of a sense of self and is exacerbated by the
sociosymbolic order that is already split into antagonistic forces and interests.36 Julia Kristeva
describes this subjective split as strangers within ourselves, implying that the enemy-other is not
only created by the self, but has previously been part of the self.37 Rather than being an object or a
subject, such a stranger is an abject. Abjection is caused by that which disturbs identity, system, or
order, such as traumatic events, and becomes a major ingredient of collective identity formation
when the familiar stranger is recognized as a threat.
Abjectification processes affect those positioned as imaginary others; the colonial, the immi-
grants, and the Muslims. Growing up in Europe with its often sharp delineation of communities, bor-
ders, and identities, many young Muslims continue to suffer from past legacies of colonial conquest
and perceptions of Europe. This has been intensively felt in a post-September 11 context. In com-
parison with many of their parents who arrived as economic migrants in the fifties and onward with
their homeland traditions and languages more or less intact, post-diasporic Muslims do not always
share their parents identification with their homelands but rather experience being a Muslim minor-
ity in a Western society.38 Instead of finding guidance from a close-knit, often ethnic community,
many young Muslims thus find their information and guidance through modern mass media and the
new information technologies. Without much religious knowledge, but in search of moral certainty
and a place in the world (i)mpressionable young European Muslims . . . are given an identity com-
pass whose discourse of global Islam allows them to understand themselves as part of a larger
struggle against hegemony, imperialism and godless capital.39
It is here that we can see the full effects of structural exclusion and psychological vulnerability in
which some Muslims in their search for an embracing identity take refuge in the abjectification of
others in response to a symbolic order in which they are already abjectified. The stories of Taimour
Abdulwahab and Jyllands-Posten become plots in counternarratives focused on resisting exclusion-
ary definitions of whiteness, homogenous nations, and Europe. As counternarratives, they are set on
challenging and redefining postcolonial imaginary identifications, but in so doing they become
equally hegemonic narratives governed by fear and insecurity in which acts of terror are used to
define the borders of the community. Reacting against Swedish involvement in Afghanistan, Abdul-
wahab stated for instance that Now your children, your daughters and your sisters will die as our
brothers, our sisters and our children are dying. These interventions work as psychological
moments. They partake in and reinforce earlier traumatic events by closing down alternative inter-
pretations and by playing a significant part in the struggle for hegemony and power. Relying on his-
torical narratives, they delineate the borders of the community and work to create an ongoing feeling
of living in a state of urgency, thus further reinforcing a search for secure selves in the light of dis-
courses on terror and identity. For some individuals and groups, they constitute an ongoing sense of
being participants in a European trauma.
Kinnvall 273

Narrating Borders: Chosen Traumas and Chosen Glories

In Lacanian terminology, these previous histories show an aspect of our lives that has preceded us,
an aspect that was already beyond our control. In much trauma literature, this is referred to as the
intergenerational transmission of trauma.40 A crucial Lacanian category in theorizing this process
is that of master signifiers, that is, those signifiers to which a subjects identity is most intimately
bound, such as nation, religion, gender, and culture. However, these are never predetermined; rather
they are what Lacan refers to as empty signifiers or signifiers without a significant.41 Although
we can never know the nature of the signifiers ourselves, Lacan argues, we remain convinced that
others do. The naming of a European trauma is itself an abstraction or an empty signifier that is
inscribed with symbolic agency only through the interaction with a sociosymbolic order governed
by political asymmetries.42 Belief then is always belief through an Other, thus preceding the sub-
jects self-understanding. This multi-generational curse or the realization of desire43 sig-
nifies intergenerational transmissions of traumas or glories rather than causal memories. As
Simon Malpas argues in his interpretation of psychoanalytic temporality, any memories that are
connected to the symptom are not direct representations of events that really happened but
images that have been retroactively constructed.44 However, the reconstruction of previous trau-
matic or glorious events can become very powerful identity signifiers in response to the experi-
ence of insecurity and vulnerability.
Vamik Volkan45 uses the concepts of Chosen Traumas and Chosen Glories to illustrate this
process. Volkans trauma shares with Lacan the view of it as an event that decenters a sense of
self and is a shock to the system. Relying on Winnicots notions of object-relations theory, his con-
cepts are helpful for understanding how psychic recollections of past (real or imagined) grievances
or glories can transmit fanaticized expectations, intense feelings, and defenses against unacceptable
thought from one generation to the next; how feelings of ancient hatred and traumatic pasts are
constructed and maintained. Of importance is how these past grievances or glories are constantly
being reproduced in contestations of power in which other stories or events are pushed aside, mar-
ginalized, or ignored. Among some European Muslims, the defamation of the Prophet Mohammed is
thus read as the historical slander of Muslims, bringing with it earlier real or believed injuries by the
postcolonial oppressor. It is viewed as evidence of how the West has expressed hatred for Muslims
and how Islamophobia will reinforce secular anti-Muslim racism if unchecked.46
The justification for creating carnage in Stockholm and for attempting to blow up Jyllands-
Posten was in both cases focused on this defamation process in which violating the Prophet
Mohammed was said to have played a catalytic role for the decision to kill infidels. Any subjec-
tive splits, any divergent narratives, any alternative interpretations must by necessity be closed down
and silenced in this reproduction of abjective others. Narratives are always contested productions
and reproductions of reality and are never singular or united even when appearing as such. Narra-
tives work by relating actions to beliefs and desires that produce them and by situating these beliefs
and desires in particular historical contexts.47 When Taimour Abdulwahab straps himself with
explosives or when one of the men in the attack against Jyllands-Posten travels to Pakistan with his
wife and child to join the Talibans, they are doing more than acting out a preordained history or exer-
cising a given subjectivity; they are reproducing and rearticulating historical representations (Cho-
sen Traumas) as a means to constitute their present subjectivity within a particular narrative order.48
The situation of the Palestinians, the Rushdie controversy, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the
Danish cartoon crisis all become enmeshed in this reexperiencing of past narratives. Recollected
traumas are not the only motivating dynamics, however. Also romanticized glories of an alterna-
tive political order, a global Ummah (a world community of Muslims), can work emotionally to
construct excitement and bonding beyond everyday life. Not infrequently are the Internet and other
new media used in constructing these narratives.49
274 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 37(3)

As narratives they tend to be confronted by a European assimilationist myth which judges mino-
rities acceptability in terms of their compatibility with some supposedly time-less eternal attri-
butes, such as the putative hard-working, law-abiding, and family-loving white society.50 The
naming of Marwa El-Sherbini as Islamist whore by her killer was no isolated incident, but occurred
within a narrative order governed by gendered and racist myths of European (or German in this case)
supremacy in which the womb of the Muslim woman is seen as an Islamic weapon.51 Such myths tend
to place Muslims at the opposite end of these perceived qualities through a construction of historical
rivalry within past empire-building.52 Breiviks recollection of the Battle of Vienna could thus be seen
as an attempt to conjure up images of a glorious event in which an Islamic empire was defeated by a
Christian Europe, images that were to legitimize later action. As reconstructed myths, they became
connected to the selling out of Europe by socialists and others, as well as to more recent Islamic
attacks on Western identities and lifestyles. In the world fantasized by Breivik and other right-wing
agitators, September 11 came to constitute the beginning of this New War in which the Koran had
replaced the Communist manifesto as the greatest threat to Europe.
The traumatic effects of September 11 came to be reinterpreted through expansionist US
foreign policy in which the entire West became implicated. If many in the West, and particularly
Americans, experienced themselves as victims of an arbitrary and aggressive attack in the wake of
September 11, many young European Muslims felt the full effects of split subjectivity as they were
increasingly held accountable for a deed they had little to do with. As Lacan has noted, the
sociosymbolic order confers upon the subject an identity that also comes from the outside, adding
thereby an additional level of self-alienation.53 As expressed by one former member of the radical
Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahir in Britain:

HT filled a void for the young intellectually frustrated youth who had been told that Islam is the truth and
they must pray and fast by people who couldnt explain why. By HT proving that Freedom, Democ-
racy and Capitalism are defective, and that we Muslims are better than those kaffirs, it restored some of
the loss of faith in the relevance of the religion. Muslims believe in Islam but needed to know that their
belief was the superior belief, which made them feel superior again. Constant harping back to the glory
days of the Caliphate and emphasizing its restoration as the solution to all things seemed very alluring.54

Similar to Kjrsgaards romanticizing of the Danish nation, these memories of the Caliphate cre-
ate both psychic and structural representations of a glorious past and become parts of justifying the
attacks in Norway and London. They constitute plots in the narrativization of history and, together
with the repetition of previous traumatic events, they respond to insecurity and vulnerability and
become experienced as collective memories that are bordered through a series of counter-stories.
As borders, they are narrated (often by political and religious leaders) as symptoms that require
immediate attention, as antidotes to feelings of disharmony and discontinuity.
This can be illustrated by the London bombers justification of their actions in terms of Khans
video, aired by Al Jazeera on September 1, 2005. References were made to the glories of martyrdom,
but also to the traumas of past and continued imperialism. Similar to Breiviks distorted version of a
historical conspiracy between the West and oil-producing countries, Khans video talks about how
9/11 was a plot planned by the US government as a pretext to strike back at Muslims everywhere.55
This narrative of an abjective West is paralleled by that of abjective Muslims, in which fears of
Islam seem to provide answers to segments of majority populations in Europe in need of bordered
identities. In his muddled defense of the massacre, Breivik talks about how Norway has turned
away from its glorious past of the 1950s when doors were unlocked and the world consisted of
real men and (especially) real women, when Christianity had an impact, when Norway was devoid
of radical feminism and political correctness. His views, most of which have been borrowed from
the Unabomber and other Internet sources, are jumbled and twisted, but they share a concern with
Kinnvall 275

much right-wing rhetoric of longing for the past, of glorifying the nation, and of bordering the
community. Most significant in terms of governance is how these narratives work to discipline and
normalize exclusionary, sometimes violent ideas, both among new nationalists and among some
young Muslim radicals.

Governing Traumas
Many of the issues guiding far-right movements in Europe have become mainstream. Leaders of
Germany, France, and BritainMerkel, Sarkozy, and Camerondeclared an end to multicultural-
ism, with Merkel arguing that it had failed, utterly failed, and Cameron insisting that we need
more, not less muscular liberalism to confront Islamic extremism.56 This failure of multicultur-
alism narrative has been reinforced through global narratives of terror and Islamophobia and has
gained further strength through much local media.
Instructively, Didier Bigo has described this process as a shift in governmentalitya shift from
the panoptical to the banoptical. Whereas in the panopticon everybody was subjected to the disci-
plining gaze (a model prison proposed by Jeremy Bentham referring to around the clock surveil-
lance), Bigo defines the banopticon as a regime of practices where specific groups are blamed
already before they have done anything, simply by categorizing them, anticipating profiles of risk
from previous trends, and projecting them by generalization upon the potential behavior of each
individual pertaining to the risk category.57 This form of governmentality of unease, or Ban, is the
work of biometric borders that redefine external and internal security. It relies on exceptionalism,
acts of profiling and containing foreigners, and a normative imperative of mobility.58 Such practices
exist within reinvented master narratives that aim to reify an object reality, manifest in clear bound-
aries. They are mutually related and form political identities and act as coconstructors of individuals
and groups self-identity in relation to significant others.
Foucault argued for a form of critical social analysis focused on events, moments when an
existing regime of practices is reinvested, co-opted and redeployed by new social forces and gov-
ernmental rationalities.59 As Louise Amoore has argued, immigration and the terrorist threat
became combined as a problem not because there is a threat to the survival of society but because
scenes from everyday lives are politicized, because day-to-day living is securitized.60 This secur-
itization of day-to-day lives is likely to focus on restoring a sense of community, security, and
order,61 but in so doing the very exclusions and prejudices that initiate conflict are often reconsti-
tuted. The story in which the father was defending his sons action becomes just another plot in this
reconstitution of a narrative order in which the father can make sense of himself as part of a larger
process of exclusionary knowledge construction. Within this process, fear and anger frequently
remain unacknowledged which can result in the recreation of a culture of anxiety and resentment.62
By perceiving the icon of terrorism in terms of a Muslim man, discourses on terror play into the
hands of the European Right, echoing their conceptions of societies and nationhood.63
Before leaving for the city of Oslo and continuing fully armed to the island of Utya, Breivik
shared his Declaration with more than thousand people on the Internet, 547 who have been identi-
fied. Among these we find the Swedish National Democrats, the Danish Free Denmark, the English
Defence League, the British Nationalist Party, and many other extremist groups, most of which he
had been in contact with through the Internet site Gates of Vienna. The narratives that bind these
groups together are all focused on Muslims as conquerors in which mosques are portrayed as monu-
ments of Islamic victory and where Muslim women are viewed as demographic bombs. In Breiviks
construction, these two come together as narrative plots in a warning against the dangerous Islamist
who are out to destroy and assimilate the West, while the dangerous feminist is out to destroy and
assimilate men.64 The governing of these narratives is not the work of Breivik and his sympathizers
alone, however, but must be understood through larger structures of exceptionalism and narrative
276 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 37(3)

orders in which conceptions of Muslims and Islam are framed. Such conceptions have to do with the
socioeconomic and political marginalization of Muslims and the formation of public space into
national space in many parts of Europe.
In terms of individuals and groups, governance thus takes the form of surveillance of suspect
communitiesa concept first used in relation to the Irish Republican Armyin which the process
of identification of a threat legitimates the politics of exception put in place by the state.65 The words
extremism, ideology, evil, and Islamism became intertwined in the trauma narrative fol-
lowing the London attacks, interspersed with the theme of barbarism as a term associated with the
metaphorical struggle for civility. In the language of Tony Blair, this was evident in the divergence
between the terrorists, the civilized people, and those Muslims who represent the decent,
humane and principled faith of Islam.66 The feeling that Britain was under attack, that national val-
ues and national unity were under threat and that people were fearful instigated a response in which the
nation would resist and stand united. However, similar to September 11, this trauma narrative also pro-
vided a foundation for closer surveillance of these communities resulting, for instance, in the UK con-
trol orders.67 Further examples include the ban on minarets in Switzerland in 2009 and the ban on
religious symbols in French schools in 2004 and of Muslim full face niqabs and burkas in 2011. Events
surrounding these incidents illustrate the particular postcolonial forms of governance facing European
Muslims. As forms of governance, they work at the emotional level to construct a normality prevailed
by fear and anxiety. They contribute toward the feeling that majority populations are dealing with the
legacies of these traumas through everyday securitization of European public space.
Such governance obviously affects those communities under surveillance. In the 2010 report on
suspect communities, the young Muslims interviewed felt the effects of such surveillance as they
talked of fearfulness, of lying low, and keeping their heads down.68 The rhetorical question
posed by Yassin Elforkani, Imam for the JIJ Foundation (Youth invest in Youth) in the Netherlands,
is a good illustration of how the trauma of September 11 and events related to it are constantly
repeated through the securitization of suspect communities. How do you think these youngsters
feel, now that a majority of the Dutch people wants them to leave? Elforkani ponders. They were
born and raised here, but many have to justify themselves continuously. Why do you wear a head-
scarf? Are you allowed to kill innocent civilians in the name of Allah? Are women worth less
according to Islam? These are questions they are confronted with every day. As a response, theyre
looking ever more closely to their beliefs and holding on to their religious symbols and traditions in
order to emphasize their Muslim identity.69
Such responses can be understood in terms of the fracturing and decentering of a sense of self and
are exacerbated by the sociosymbolic order that is itself split into antagonistic forces and interests. It
should hence come as no surprise that in response to this search for secure identities, for a new normal-
ity, some young Muslims start believing in the master signifiers described by Islamic leaders in their
efforts to limit definitions of Islam and Muslims. The governing of Islam exists in relation to this
new politics of surveillance and is focused on disciplining and bordering homogenous bodies by flat-
tening differences and idiosyncrasies.70 Islam thus gives a romantic sense to the conception of com-
munity. It serves as a justification for internal cohesion and ethnic pride, providing a means of
recovering lost youth and reaching out to the victims of immigration.71 By casting Muslims as vic-
tims of current and previous traumas, Islamist organizations have been able to appeal to many young
Muslims by claiming to have a remedy for the symptoms of the loss of cultural and social markers.

Conclusion
For many young Muslims and for segments of European majority populations, the legacies of 9/11
and subsequent attacks have created what Lawrence has referred to as a chronic trauma in which
their pain and loss of trust in the everyday world is played out.72 As Kleinman and Kleinman argue:
Kinnvall 277

Studies of dissociation show that when individuals and small groups are under great pressure of trauma-
tizing occurrence or other deeply disturbing events, there is a focus of attention and narrowing of the field
of awareness away from what is menacing toward absorption in a safer place. That place may be ones
imaginings, an alternative self, or concentration on a highly focused part of the social field. Perception,
imagination, and memory are absorbed into that particular focus.73

For those who have rejected capitalism, socialism, and globalization as programmatic solutions to
current ills, religious fundamentalisms and European nationalisms remain as viable and coherent
grand narratives. These psychological moments form part of an ongoing chronic European trauma,
built on previous (real or imagined) traumas (and glories) of the past and played out in counternar-
ratives in the present. These are the moments in which Chosen Traumas and Chosen Glories can
merge and work as exclusionary borders in defining self and othersin which hegemonic interpre-
tations of identity turn into normalizing narratives that justify violence. These are perhaps the
moments that made Taimour Abdulwahab, the man who blew himself up in Stockholm, to take
Swedish presence in Afghanistan as the pretext for his actions. These are possibly the moments that
made a young man of Tunisian background travel to Pakistan with his young wife and child to join
the Talibans and then later on take part in a conspiracy to blow up a Danish newspaper. These are
probably the moments that made a German Russian so blinded by hate and fear of others that a
young woman was murdered and her husband mistakenly shot because of limited imaginaries. These
are most likely the Glories in which the son was remembered and revered in references to the per-
ceived historical traumas suffered in the hands of Muslims. These are, I would argue, the European
trauma of our times.
Within this trauma, the world of Breivik is reminiscent of the world of Mohammad Sidique Khan
as essentialist narratives of past, present, and future actions are linked together. They both exist
within a Eurocentric sociosymbolic order in which imaginary others are already predefined through
postcolonial practices and in which terror discourses and acts of counterterrorism have created vic-
tims in the wake of September 11. In stark contrast to George W. Bush and Tony Blair, however, the
Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg has continued to meet the attacks in Norway with pro-
mises of more democracy and more openness as a way to resist the perpetuation of this chronic
trauma and as a means to escape the psychological moments that shape Europe of today. This
means resisting any curtailing of lawful rights at a judicial level, but it also involves everyday
practices of resistance and psychological resilience in order to counter asymmetric structures of
power and refuse the continuous labeling and hatred of others. As expressed by one of the survi-
vors of the Utya massacre, if one man can create so much hate, imagine how much love all of us
can create together. Such everyday practices may eventually challenge and desecuritize the
normalized bordering processes we encounter in Europe today. If, as Claudia Aradau has
argued, securitization orders social relations according to the logic of political realism and insti-
tutionalizes an exceptionalism of speed, extraordinary measures and friend/enemy, then desecur-
itization must become a normative project which reclaims a notion of democratic politics where
the struggle for emancipation is possible.74
In normative terms, this requires prizing open any hegemonic narratives, including that of the
West, as narratives are always interlocked with political, economic, and cultural conditions of soci-
eties and because narratives have a strong ontological function at all levels at which they operate.75
Addressing narrative change is not enough, however, also structural positioning needs to be taken
into account promoting, in the words of Henry, empowerment and resistance to forms of subjuga-
tion; the politicization and mobilization of marginalized groups; the transformation of social, cul-
tural and economic institutions, and the dismantling of dominant cultural hierarchies, structures
and systems of representation.76 Many young people from different cultural and religious back-
grounds refuse to be positioned into stereotypic notions of who they are or are supposed to be.
278 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 37(3)

Instead, they challenge both majority and minority norms and romanticized narratives through
everyday practices and engagement. Many of these are at the forefront of building bridges to the
larger political society and work through cultural and religious compromises to challenge monolo-
gical closures of self and identity and unjustified dominance of some voices over others.

Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Ian Manners, Sarah Scuzzarello and Ted Svensson as well as the special issue
editors for constructive comments on an earlier version of this article. She would also like to acknowledge the
financial support from the project Democracy Beyond the Nation-State? Transnational Actors and Global
Governance, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. Klaus Eder, Europes Borders: The Narrative Construction of the Boundaries of Europe, European Jour-
nal of Social Theory 9, no. 2 (2006): 25571.
2. Jan Lewenhagen, Marwa far Tyskland att vakna, Dagens Nyheter, 2009, July 9.
3. Thomas Scheff, Review of VamikVolkans Blind Trust: Large Groups and Their Leaders in Times of Cri-
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December 11, 2010, http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/man-sprangde-sig-sjalv-i-stockholm_5802915.
svd. See also TT; BBC, December 13, 2010.
5. Sveriges Radio (Swedish Radio), Wednesday, December 29, 2010; Svenska Dagbladet, December 29,
2010.
6. Catarina Kinnvall and Paul Nesbitt-Larking, Security, Subjectivity and Space in Postcolonial Europe:
Muslims in the diaspora, European Security 18, no. 3 (2009): 30525.
7. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge:
Polity, 1991); Catarina Kinnvall, Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search
for Ontological Security, Political Psychology 25 (2004): 74167.
8. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sherdan, ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1981); Simon Malpas, History Balancing the
Scales: Time and Trauma in Psychoanalysis, Time and Society 5, no. 3 (1996): 301-17; Marguerite La
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9. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, note 8. See also JacquesLacan, The Seminar
of Jacques Lacan, Book II. The Ego in Freuds Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955,
trans. S. Tomaselli and J. Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988); Heinz Kohut, How does Analysis Cure? ed. by
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13, 2011.
11. Long-term scars of London bombs, Guardian, November 30, 2006.
12. Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 39
Kinnvall 279

13. Yael Danieli, Danny Brown, and Joe Sills, The Trauma of Terrorism, Journal of Aggression, Maltreat-
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14. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, note 8, 55.
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Religious Nationalism in India: The Search for Ontological security (London: Routledge 2006).
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Political Psychology of Globalization: Muslims in the West (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011).
29. Homi Bhabha, Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, October 28 (1984):
12533; Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London, Penguin Books, 1970).
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nydanske-lever-som-i-1005.html.
35. Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1996).
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note 20; Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Thiking in the Space between Winnicot and Lacan, International
Journal of Psychoanalysis 90 (2009):95781.
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280 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 37(3)

39. Peter Mandaville, Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma (London: Routledge, 2001),
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of Right-wing Sentiment in Europe, New York Times, July 23, 2011.
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(2006):33651, p. 338.
61. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, note 12.
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nity after Trauma, European Journal of Social Theory 11, no. 3 (2008): 385403; Frank Furedi, Therapy
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64. NRK, Ord som Dreper (Words that Kill), broadcast, Tuesday December 13, 2011.
65. Mary J. Hickman, Lyn Thomas, Sara Silvestri, and Henry Nickels, Suspect Communities? Counter-
terrorism Policy, the Press, and the Impact on Irish and Muslim Communities in Britain (London Metro-
politan University, 2011). Report funded by the ESRC.
66. Tony Blair, September 27, 2005, quoted in Hickman ibid., 12.
67. Dominique Casciani, Control Orders, BBC News, Monday, February 10, 2010.
68. Hickman et al., Suspect Communities, note 65.
Kinnvall 281

69. European Union, The Rift between the Native Dutch and the Muslims in the Netherlands is Growing
Wider, The EU Initiative Report: For Diversity against Discrimination (2010), accessed December 17,
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70. Amoore, Biometric Borders, note 60.
71. Riva Kastoryano, French Secularism and Islam: Frances Headscarf Affair, in Multiculturalism, Mus-
lims and Citizenship, ed. T. Modood, A. Trianafyllidou, and R. Zaata-Barrero (London: Routledge,
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72. Patricia Lawrence, Violence, Suffering, Amman: The Work of Oracles in Sri Lankas Eastern war zone,
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74. Claudia Aradau, Security and the Democratic Scene: Desecuritization and Emancipation, Journal of
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76. Frances Henry, Canadas Contribution to the Management of Ethno-cultural Diversity, Canadian
Journal of Communication 27, no. 2 (2002): 23142 at p. 238.

Bio
Catarina Kinnvall is a professor of Political Science at Lund University in Sweden and former vice
president of the International Society of Political Psychology.