Schuermans maesschalck

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Fear of crime as a political weapon: Explaining the rise of

extreme-right politics in the Flemish countryside

DRAFT – please do not quote without permission

NICK SCHUERMANS, FILIP DE MAESSCHALCK

Afdeling Sociale en Economische Geografie

Departement Aard- en Omgevingswetenschappen

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Celestijnenlaan 200E

3001 Heverlee

Belgium

[email protected]

[email protected]

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Abstract

Our qualitative focus group research on feelings of insecurity in rural and

suburban Flanders demonstrates how fear of crime impacts on the everyday

life of middle class ‘white’ Flemings. The study reveals a widespread fear of

cities and what we call ‘islands of otherness’ outside these cities, while the

rest of the countryside is considered to be much safer. This geography of fear

has its origins in the respondents’ fear of foreigners and the metaphorical

racialization of the Flemish landscape in ‘multicultural’ cities, ‘islands of

otherness’ and ‘white’ villages. In this article, we focus on the dialectics

between this spatialized culture of fear, ethnocentrism and the rise of the

Vlaams Belang in the Flemish countryside. We argue that a rural or suburban

vote for the extreme-right wing party is an ethnocentric protest vote against

the racialization and the insecurity of the central cities and against the

imagined infection of the ‘white’ and ‘safe’ countryside with urban diseases

like crime and foreigners. As such, the article shows how central the notions

of fear of crime, race and ethnocentrism are in the social, cultural, emotional

and political construction of rural and suburban Flanders.

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Introduction

Reviews of the literature on fear of crime conclude that there is a manifest

lack of agreement on its underlying causes (Hale, 1996). Most criminologists,

for example, take the objectively quantifiable risk to become a victim of crime

as their starting point, while urban planners generally consider physical or

social characteristics of neighborhoods (Pain, 2000). Explanations based on

the poor design of public space, crime statistics or community deterioration

have recently been criticized, however, because they ‘tend towards the

individualistic and deterministic and miss discussions about the social

structures and power relations which surround offenders, victims and those

who fear crime’ (Shirlow and Pain, 2003: 20). A growing body of literature

therefore suggests that the social, cultural and emotional aspects of

geographical experience should be more central to research on fear of crime

(Pain, 2000). This implies attention for the way social power relations

interweave with identity questions to dominate the use and misuse of space

(Little, Panelli and Kraack, 2005). Koskela (1999), for example, did not

attribute the fear of her female respondents in Helsinki to crime waves, bad

street lighting or individualism, but to male domination in the city and the way

it affects women’s sense of vulnerability to sexual harassment, violent attacks

and criminal offences in general.

Now that the complexity of fear of crime has become recognized, standard

research methods are reconsidered as well. Quantitative surveys with

questions such as ‘How safe do you feel or would you feel being out alone in

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your neighborhood at night?’ have been criticized because they mix actual

with hypothetical assessments and because they only consider fear in specific

circumstances, namely in the neighbourhood of the respondent, without

company and at night (Hale, 1996). Moreover, and more importantly, they

treat fear of crime as a concrete attribute of individuals rather than a

problematic social construction. Consequently, social and cultural

geographers have turned to qualitative research methods (Pain, 1997; Day,

1999).

In this article, we seek to further this qualitative research through a threefold

critique of the framework outlined above. First, we must acknowledge that

geographers have not paid enough attention to fear of crime in rural and

suburban environments (Pain, 2000; Panelli, Little and Kraack, 2004).

Because the simplistic assumption that people feel safe outside the big cities

has not been exposed to much critical examination, we will discuss the results

of a focus group research on feelings of insecurity in rural and suburban

Flanders. The study will demonstrate that a lot of ‘white’ middle class

Flemings are not only afraid in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, but also

in a limited number of similar places in their own villages.

Secondly, we would like to argue that a strong focus on social exclusion has

diverted attention from the fact that fear of crime is often politically constructed

and used in the exercise of political power (Shirlow and Pain, 2003; Robin,

2004; Pain and Smith, 2008). Because the manipulation of fear of crime as a

political weapon remains under-researched, even though it is generally

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accepted that politicians play to everyday fears and that fear takes its shape

from political elites, the last section of this paper will focus on spatialized

discourses on fear as possible explanations of the recent electoral success of

the extreme-right Vlaams Belang (VB)1 in Flanders (De Maesschalck, 2000).

Our explorative analysis of VB manifestoes and newspaper articles will

demonstrate that fear is a central component of the VB discourse, even on the

countryside. This will help us to explain why the ethnocentric party could reap

24.2 per cent of the Flemish votes in the most recent regional elections of

June 2004.

Thirdly, critics argue that feminist geographers have dominated the field to

date. Their interest in spatialized gender politics has definitely led to a

renewed investigation of fear as a force structuring women’s everyday life, but

it has minimized, at the same time, the attention for race, class or age as

interlocking and overlapping positions in frightening situations (Day, 1999;

Kern, 2005). Since we believe that an in-depth investigation of the role of

race, ethnicity and ethnocentrism is missing in most current studies on fear,

the middle sections of this paper will discuss racialized understandings of fear

of crime in popular and political discourses from a geographical perspective.

More concretely, we will explain the geography of fear and the associated

electoral success of the VB through the omnipresent fear of foreigners on the

countryside and the metaphorical racialization of the segregated Flemish

landscape in ‘white’ villages, ‘islands of otherness’ and ‘multicultural’ cities.

Ethnocentrism in rural and suburban Flanders

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To address this triple critique, it will be necessary to focus on the spatial

variation of ethnocentrism in Flanders first. After all, fear of foreigners is

highest among most prejudiced or most ethnocentric persons (Day, 1999:310)

and everyday racism is the main determinant influencing a vote for the VB

(Billiet and de Witte, 2008). In addition, people with a negative attitude to

cultural diversity avoid racialized places more often too (Ackaert and Van

Craen, 2005). Because fear, voting for the extreme right and negative

attitudes towards ethnic minorities are so intimately connected, the first

section of this paper will question whether inhabitants of Flemish cities with a

lot of foreigners are, in general, more or less ethnocentric than those of rural

or suburban municipalities where these are rather rare.

To answer such a question, a multi-level analysis is the most suitable

technique. It is a form of regression analysis whereby, after the computation

of a general regression equation, the remaining variance is split into an

individual variance and an inter-group variance. The former is a measure for

differences on the individual level, the latter for differences between

municipalities. As such, the technique determines whether geographical

differences in ethnocentrism are context-related or a compound effect of

characteristics at the personal level. It also allows for the construction of

separate regression equations for different municipalities (Jones, 1991;

Jones, Johnston and Pattie, 1992; Duncan, 1997).

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In a first analysis, we use one independent variable at the level of the

individuals, the net household income2, and one at the level of the

municipalities, the percentage of non-European foreigners. The dependent

variable is a compound scale of ethnocentrism based on eight questions with

a value from one to five, resulting in a scale with a minimum of eight (very

ethnocentric) and a maximum of forty (not ethnocentric)3. For the 4,239 voters

from 361 municipalities that were interviewed after the federal elections of

1999 (ISPO/PIOP, 2002)4, ethnocentrism turns out to be negatively related

with income and with the number of non-European foreigners in a

municipality. This means that in our sample higher incomes and higher

percentages of non-European foreigners go, on average, together with lower

levels of ethnocentrism (model 1 in table 1).

Table 1. Output of the multi-level analyses (SAS – Proc Mixed)

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Figure 1. Levels of ethnocentrism by income in Flemish and Brussels

municipalities

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Starting from the variance at the municipal level, the intercepts and income

slopes of the different municipalities can be computed and plotted (figure 1)5.

On the resulting graph, it is striking that, on the one hand, a lot of rural and

suburban municipalities show levels of ethnocentrism which are at least as

high as those of urban areas like Antwerp or Ghent. The municipalities of the

Brussels Capital Region, on the other hand, exhibit low levels of

ethnocentrism. Interestingly enough, the municipalities in the Brussels Capital

Region with the highest levels of ethnocentrism are the most suburban ones

(De Maesschalck and Luyten, 2006). The hypothesis that there is no

ethnocentrism outside the cities, because there are no foreigners, is thus

clearly disproved. As noted in the general model, inhabitants of municipalities

with a lot of non-European foreigners are in general even less ethnocentric

than those of municipalities where these are rather rare. In the following

sections we will link these high levels of rural and suburban ethnocentrism

with local discourses on fear and associated political rhetoric.

Racialization and fear of crime in the city

To find out how people in rural and suburban Flanders talk about feelings of

insecurity, we set up meetings with four different groups: male secondary

school students in Haacht, a group of neighbors in Liedekerke, train

commuters in Rotselaar and women in Overpelt (figure 2). Each focus group

contained ten to twenty people and was gathered three times for about two

hours. In order to increase the credibility and transferability of our data (in the

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meaning of Baxter and Eyles, 1997), every group was confronted with quotes

from the three other groups in the last session.

Figure 2. Percentage of non-EU foreigners in Flanders and Brussels (2003)

Since we did not propose any discussion topics, people came up with a broad

range of issues, including food poisoning, soil pollution, road safety, terrorism,

drugs, theft and violence. Fear of crime, however, was the most important

one. Invariably, this topic came up spontaneously and was discussed rather

extensively, especially in urban areas. When we asked the students in

Haacht, for example, to propose a subject related to fear or insecurity, the

town of Mechelen was the first thing that came to their mind. Some students

told us they did not dare to walk around in Mechelen after dark. Others did,

but kept a constant eye on their belongings. In the other focus groups, similar

stories were told:

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‘They were the only Belgians left in the street. On our visits, I checked

my car at least seven times, just to make sure they were not doing

anything bad’ (Danny, male, Rotselaar about visiting his family in

Brussels and his fear of the other residents)6

Our respondents avoided certain urban neighborhoods or even complete

cities because of their fears. When a student from Haacht remarked he would

never walk around in Mechelen after ten o’clock, almost half of his classmates

agreed. In fact, even the commuters from Rotselaar admitted they would not

go to Brussels if they would not work there:

‘In Brussels it is terrible. There are a lot of Moroccans and Turks and

so on. I would not like to be left behind alone there, especially in the

evenings’ (Bart, male, Haacht)

‘Last Sunday, I have been there, in the city. And in that place, it was

close to the zoo. I don’t know the name. And I said it has completely

changed. Only strangers. I didn’t feel comfortable there and I said,

come on, let’s get out of here’ (Monique, female, Overpelt about

Antwerp)

To explain this fear in the city, two points have to be made. First, the

respondents rarely explained their fears in a discourse that focused on the

degradation of the built environment or the higher risk to become a victim of

crime. Their fears were largely inspired by an ethnocentric fear of ‘others’,

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visibly racialized ‘others’ in particular: ‘strangers’ in Antwerp and ‘Moroccans’

and ‘Turks’ in Brussels. According to Smith (1984, in Pain, 2000: 377), this

implicit connection between foreigners and crime should be seen as a way of

managing and negotiating danger. As everyone can be a potential criminal,

labelling criminals with certain social markers increases personal feelings of

power and security. Because of the illusion that white people do not commit

crime, but only certain social groups that can be clearly identified by their

physical appearance, people feel safer in encounters with unfamiliar people:

‘Actually, you will always feel a bit unsafe. If it is dark outside, and

there is a group of Moroccans or I don’t know what, and you pass

them. Then you will always feel a bit unsafe, don’t you?’ (Wim, male,

Haacht, about Mechelen)

Secondly, it is crucial that the participants in the focus groups did not think of

the city as a simple concentration of foreigners, but as an intensely racialized

place (Bonnett and Nayak, 2003; Sundstrom, 2003). The interviewees in

Liedekerke, Overpelt, Rotselaar and Haacht developed their spatial

imaginaries through a thoroughly racialized interpretation of city life and city-

dwellers and, as such, they assigned racial meanings to urban environments.

Drawing on Kobayashi and Peake’s (2000, p. 395) observation that

‘racialization always has a specific geography, and all geographies are

racialized’, we thus agree with Van der Horst (2003) ‘s contention that the

spatial expression of European life is racialized, just as American space is

marked by the division in ‘black’ inner cities and ‘white’ suburbs. Such a

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metaphorical link between race and space was evident, for example, when

respondents in Rotselaar and Overpelt talked about Antwerp or Ostend as if

they were places where only foreigners hang out:

‘Wherever you go, you don’t meet a single Belgian anymore. […] It has

become a strange city, because of these foreigners’ (Ivo, male,

Rotselaar, about Ostend)

‘There were only strangers. You didn’t see any Belgians. Only

strangers. […] You were the only Belgian around’ (Hilde, female,

Overpelt, about Antwerp)

Similar statements can be found above in the discourse of Danny on Brussels

(‘the only Belgians left in the street’) and Monique on the neighborhood

around the Antwerp zoo (‘only strangers’). For these respondents, urbanism is

undeniably associated with the presence of what they call ‘strangers’. Their

imagined city is so ‘black’, so racialized, that it has become ‘a strange city’

where they are ‘strangers’ themselves:

‘On a school trip, we were sitting in the Brussels underground and

there were so many blacks and Moroccans. My [friend] comes from

Mechelen, so he was a racist already. All of a sudden he tells me, but

really loudly “I really feel like a stranger here”’ (Bram, male, Haacht)

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These two points allow us to understand why most interviewed rural and

suburban dwellers change their behaviour in urban environments and why

they avoid certain neighborhoods, or even complete cities, after dark. Their

conduct is the result of the triple connection between urbanism, foreigners

and crime. Since the respondents make a direct link between urbanism and

foreigners and between foreigners and crime, they associate urban

environments immediately with unsafety and insecurity. As such, we can

conclude that it is through the racialization of the urban landscape that fear of

the criminal, which comes down to fear of the foreigner, gets encoded in

space, so that cities are feared, not criminals (Day, 1999: 314)7.

Racialization and fear of crime outside the city

English geographers stress that the darkening of urban areas goes hand in

hand with the whitening of rural and suburban environments (Agyeman and

Spooner, 1997; Bonnett, 2002). While popular discourse represents cities like

Manchester and London as a disruption to the authenticity of England, the

English countryside may be described as a ‘repository of white values,

ideologies and lifestyles’ (Hubbard, 2005: 12). As racialized others are

deemed out-of-place in traditional ‘white’ villages, Tyler (2003: 408) concludes

that the idea of the village is a ‘potent symbol in the construction and control

of a racialized set of specifically middle class values’.

This racialization of the village as a ‘white’ space was evident in our focus

groups too. When we asked the participants in Overpelt how they would

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describe their village, they did not think about the great number of Dutch

immigrants, Turks, Moroccans and asylum seekers. In stead, they referred to

sociability and solidarity, followed by a carefully pronounced ‘And still few

strangers as yet’. In the same way as they exaggerated the presence of North

Africans, ‘blacks’ and other ‘strangers’ in Antwerp, Brussels and Mechelen,

they downplayed their presence in their own living environments.

Initially, this caricatural division of the real ethnic and racial landscape in

‘black’ cities and ‘white’ villages led to a similar dichotomy regarding fear of

crime. All respondents considered the countryside to be much safer than the

city. The students in Haacht, for instance, immediately referred to the city of

Mechelen as a dangerous place. Only after some specific questions, they

admitted that they sometimes felt unsafe in their own villages too. In the same

way, a lot of people in Liedekerke told us they were too afraid to go to

Brussels, while they did not avoid any places in their own village, even after

dark.

In our understanding, these spatial imaginaries rest on the double racialization

of criminality and space. Because criminality is automatically projected on

foreigners, the contrast between the ‘white’ countryside and the ‘black’ city

initially results in an interrelated dichotomy between the ‘safe’ countryside and

the ‘unsafe’ city. In the imagination of ethnocentric rural and suburban

residents, dangerous foreigners are confined to towns and cities, while the

rural and suburban landscape is aligned with ‘whiteness’ and the absence of

danger (Agyeman and Spooner, 1997: 199). The idea that the village is much

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safer than the city is thus the spatial effect of the ethnocentric assumption that

only so-called ‘strangers’ are criminals. It is precisely because of the

connection between foreigners, criminality and cities, that rural and suburban

dwellers initially feel relatively safe in their own villages.

The utopian vision of ‘stranger’ and crime free villages has, however, been

shattered by reality. According to the latest victimization surveys, there is, on

average, more attempted burglaries in rural municipalities than in regional

towns like Ostend or Mechelen (Federale Politie, 2006). In addition, there is

not a single Flemish municipality without foreigners. Even municipalities with

less than 100 foreigners are rare (Kesteloot, 2006; figure 2). It is true that

Turks and Moroccans are mainly living in cities, but also in villages like

Liedekerke or Overpelt they are moving into inexpensive working class

houses. (Kesteloot, 2006). Unsurprisingly, the respondents often projected

their fears on these local foreigners (cfr. Meert et al., 2004):

‘I know people living between Kortrijk and Menen. They have built a

wall around their house and really, they are all sitting in their rooms

with guns and after six o’clock in the evening they don’t go out

anymore. That’s because of these North Africans from France’ (Jef,

male, Wezemaal)

‘If I pass the Valkenhof [asylum centre] in the evening, and those real

blacks are there, I have nothing against them, but for me they are more

scary than someone who is not black’ (Gerda, female, Overpelt)

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In Liedekerke, the respondents initially could not come up with any good

reasons to be afraid in their own village. Only after insisting, they started to

talk about a local crime wave. The suspects were not Belgians, but Eastern

Europeans:

‘Lately it has started here with these Serbs, Romanians, …’ ‘Poles,

Kosovars, Albanians’ (Ward and Dieter, male, Liedekerke)

‘It is beginning here. If you see that Eastern European countries,

Romania, Poland, … Last week they have run in another one breaking

into a house’ (Patrick, male, Liedekerke)

‘It is not Belgians that they run in. It is always strangers. I am not a

racist, but it’s true’ (Ingrid, female, Liedekerke)

For the respondents, criminal offences on the countryside were inextricably

bound up with the presence of foreigners. In their perception, rural and

suburban crime was only committed by what they call ‘strangers’. The

ethnocentric association between crime or fear of crime and ‘real blacks’,

‘North Africans’ or ‘Eastern European’ gangsters was patently obvious. With

phrases such as ‘lately it has started here’ and ‘now it is beginning here’, the

people in Liedekerke even insinuated that their village was crime free until the

arrival of these foreigners.

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This does not imply, however, that the respondents feared their immediate

living environments in the same way as they feared the city. The interviewees

did not consider Rotselaar, Overpelt, Haacht or Liedekerke as frightening as

Brussels, Antwerp or Mechelen. Despite the increased visibility of foreigners

outside cities, the sense of safety that is associated with the racialization of

the rural and the suburban as a ‘white’ space remained largely intact. When

this representation was under threat, for example because of the construction

of an asylum centre in Lindel (Overpelt), the resulting ‘otherness’ was spatially

confined and contained:

‘In here it happens as well, in the Holheide district, a separate district of

Lindel. A lot of strangers are living there. And in the evening, towards

half-past nine – ten o’clock, they all flock together and make the district

unsafe’ (Monique, female, Overpelt)

Monique could not tell us whether these ‘strangers’ from Holheide were adults

or children. She avoided the district, especially after sunset, just like a lot of

others in the focus group (cfr. Ackaert and Van Craen, 2005). In a similar way,

people in other focus groups told us they kept away from certain street

corners, squares or districts in their villages. These places were generally

stigmatised because of the presence of foreigners and therefore excluded

from mainstream village life, as evident when Monique calls the area around

the asylum centre a ‘separate district’ of Lindel.

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By marking off such ‘islands of otherness’, rural and suburban dwellers do not

need to cast doubt on the racialization of the rest of their living environments

as ‘white’ and the sense of security that comes with it. The racialization of the

Flemish landscape in ‘black’ cities, ‘white’ villages and ‘islands of otherness’

has thus the same effect as the racialization of criminality. Just as everyone

you meet could be a criminal, crime can be committed everywhere. The idea

that crime is almost exclusively committed by foreigners, and consequently

practically only occurs in big cities and a number of ‘islands of otherness’ is

thus liberating. Through the association of crime with certain people and

certain places, it is distanced from the self, both socially and geographically

(Pain, 1997: 236). This leads to an excessive sense of security in other places

or with other people.

Fear of crime and the rise of the Vlaams Belang

In the last section of this article, we will demonstrate that fear of crime is not

only a core element in the spatial images of rural and suburban dwellers, but

also in the political discourses of the VB. Traditionally, the growth of one the

most successful extreme-right wing parties in Europe has been explained by

its populist rhetoric on racism and security (Billiet and de Witte, 2008).

Because the countryside has always been thought to be problem-free in terms

of immigration, integration and crime, the recent rise of the VB in rural and

suburban Flanders has surprised a lot of analysts (figure 38; De Decker,

Kesteloot, De Maesschalck and Vranken, 2005). Our explorative analysis of

party manifestoes and newspaper articles summarized below clearly

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demonstrates, however, that the popular ethnocentric imaginations around

fear, ‘strangers’, villages and cities have their origins in, and are being

confirmed by, the ethnocentric discourse that the VB propagates. This has,

however, not always been the case. Only in 1987, insecurity made its first

explicit appearance in the party manifesto (De Maesschalck and Loopmans,

2003):

Figure 3. The growth of the extreme-right Vlaams Belang in municipal

elections (1982-2006)

‘We are worried about increasing insecurity on the street, in the shop

and often even at home. Crime is on the increase. In ever more

neighborhoods of our big and medium-sized cities it is not advisable to

go out after dark’ (Vlaams Blok, 1987)

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Initially, the party connected urbanism and insecurity without any explicit

reference to foreigners, but four years later, the VB already blamed them for

the ‘increasing insecurity’ in cities (De Maesschalck and Loopmans, 2003):

‘A recent state police report proves that crime rates among non-

European foreigners are four times higher than among the own

population. 33 percent of the imprisoned criminals are foreigners’

(Vlaams Blok, 1991)

‘Masses of Turks, Moroccans, etc. are sticking together in our big

cities. Second and third generation youngsters are uprooted and form

an enduring focus of dissatisfaction and crime’ (Vlaams Blok, 1991)

These explicit links between cities, foreigners and crime eventually became

the backbone of the party (Swyngedouw, 2001). The three V’s (Veiligheid,

Vreemdelingen, Vlaanderen – Security, Strangers, Flanders) were the VB’s

big hit story. The ethnocentric party could reap 24.2 per cent of the Flemish

votes in the most recent regional elections of June 2004 because it used fear

of crime to attract political power. The party stands for a repressive policy that

fights crime by all means, and in this way it can promise its electorate to be

able to live, work and shop again safely in the city centers they fear so much.

With zero-tolerance policing and the forced repatriation of criminal immigrants,

the VB proposes middle class urban, suburban and rural dwellers to secure

the city against crime and frightening foreigners (De Decker, Kesteloot, De

Maesschalck and Vranken, 2005).

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Initially, the VB discourse was mainly directed at urban areas. From the 2006

elections onwards, Filip Dewinter, the VB leader in the Flemish parliament,

however, explicitly aimed to exploit rural and suburban fears with the

catchphrase ‘liveable Flanders’:

‘In the cities, a vote for the VB is often an offensive vote against crime

and foreigners. In the green belt, it is in the first place a defensive vote

against the problems of the cities. Flanders threatens to become one

large urban area. Against that, we oppose the rural image of liveable

Flanders’ (Filip Dewinter, in Cochez, 2006)

In Schoten, a suburban village in the agglomeration of Antwerp, the VB

obtained its highest vote percentage in 2006. The local party leader and

member of the Flemish parliament, Marie-Rose Morel, stated:

‘We want to stop the spread of Antwerp with its traffic and crime. You

say Schoten only counts fifty-five Moroccans? This number can always

increase. It isn’t wrong to think about the future, is it?’ (Brinckman,

2006)

These two quotes make clear that a vote for the VB in places like Liedekerke,

Schoten or Overpelt should not only be understood as an ethnocentric protest

vote against the insecurity and racialization of Antwerp, Mechelen and

Brussels. In rural and suburban municipalities, the electoral success of the VB

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also reflects the ethnocentric longing for a mythic ‘whiteness’ and the sense of

security that comes with it. In this way, a rural or suburban vote for the VB is

what Filip Dewinter (cfr. supra) calls a ‘defensive vote’, or what De Decker

and Kesteloot (2000: 257) call an ‘anticipatory vote’, a vote that has to stop

the imagined ‘infection’ of the countryside with urban ‘diseases’ like crime,

Moroccans and other foreigners. As such, the VB does not only politicize the

popular discourse on the insecurity of the central cities, but also the feelings

of safety attached to the desired ‘whiteness’ of the rest of the country.

Discussion and conclusion

Our focus group research in Haacht, Rotselaar, Overpelt and Liedekerke

revealed that a lot of respondents felt not only unsafe in cities like Brussels,

Antwerp or Mechelen, but also in so-called ‘islands of otherness’ in their own

villages. Most interviewees changed their behaviour in these environments

and avoided certain neighborhoods or complete cities, especially after dark.

We argued that their conduct was mainly inspired by an ethnocentric fear of

‘strangers’. Through the racialization of space, the categorisation and

simplification of humanity in ‘Belgian’ and ‘stranger’, ‘white’ and ‘black’, ‘good’

and ‘bad’, ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’, ‘reassuring’ and ‘frightening’, does not only work

between different groups of people, but also between different places.

Because of the ethnocentric assumption that criminals are ‘strangers’ and that

‘strangers’ are criminals, places which are metaphorically filled with

‘strangers’, like ‘multicultural’ cities and ‘islands of otherness’, are

automatically frightening for a lot of rural and suburban dwellers.

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Our study made also clear that the growing electorate of the VB in rural and

suburban Flanders is symptomatic for these high levels of fear since the VB

discourse appeals to rural and suburban dwellers in two ways. On the one

hand, the VB takes advantage of protest votes against the unsafety and the

insecurity of the city centres. On the other hand, the party politicizes the

imagined infection of the ‘white’ and ‘safe’ countryside with criminal

foreigners. Because of this double attraction, we believe that the electoral

potential of the VB is even higher in rural and suburban areas than in the

traditional extreme-right bastions like Antwerp and Mechelen.

Despite the ethnocentric fears and voting patterns, the participants of the

focus groups did not consider themselves ethnocentric. Statements giving

evidence of an ethnocentric attitude were often accompanied by phrases like

‘I am not a racist, but…’ or ‘I have nothing against them, but…’ (cfr. supra). In

this way, the respondents denied their own ethnocentric attitudes and

projected them on cities and city dwellers. This was most obvious when Bram

from Haacht said his friend from Mechelen felt like a ‘stranger’ on a school trip

to Brussels: ‘My [friend] comes from Mechelen, so he was a racist already’.

Despite the high levels of ethnocentrism observed on the countryside, Bram

thus reinforced the notion that ethnocentrism can only spatially occur where

‘strangers’ live: in a town like Mechelen, but not on the countryside of Haacht

(cfr. Watt, 1998: 688).

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Just as Bram projected foreigners and ethnocentrism on cities, studies on

race, racialization or ethnocentrism have focused primarily on urban areas

(Agyeman and Spooner, 1997). Our findings make us conclude that social

and cultural geography has been blind to the problems of rural and suburban

ethnocentrism, ethnocentric fear and ethnocentric voting for too long. The

refusal to study the relationships between race, racism and rurality has often

been premised on the idea that it is the presence of foreigners which creates

a race problem and that therefore, without this presence, the issue becomes

superfluous and irrelevant (Neal, 2002: 448). Our racialized and politicized

analysis of rural and suburban fear forces us, however, to think beyond the

deeply disturbing cliché that ‘white’ areas do not have a race problem

(Bonnett, 1999). Our findings have demonstrated, indeed, that the notions of

fear of crime, race and ethnocentrism are very central to the social, cultural,

emotional and political construction of the Flemish rural and suburban

landscape. The interrelations we have found between the omnipresent fear of

foreigners, the rise of the VB and the high levels of ethnocentrism in rural and

suburban Flanders, make us plead for a renewed interest in rurality, politics

and racialization in geographical studies on fear of crime.

Acknowledgements

This article could not have been realized without the energetic support of

Henk Meert. Together with Lieve Coorevits and Herlinda Maes, he set up the

focus group interviews on feelings of insecurity for the King Baudouin

Foundation (Albers and Teller, 2006) and together with Pascal De Decker,

26

Marcia England, Chris Kesteloot, Bruno Meeus and Stephanie Simon, he

provided us with comprehensive comments on draft versions of this text.

Henk’s death means a tremendous loss of intellectual power to the struggle

for social justice and of a fantastic friend and colleague at our institute.

Nick Schuermans’ PhD research is funded by a grant of the Institute for the

Promotion of Innovation through Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT-

Vlaanderen).

Notes

1 Vlaams Belang was called Vlaams Blok until the party was sentenced for

racism in 2004.

2 While the income variable contains twenty-eight categories (broken down

into categories of 20,000 Belgian Francs or 496 EURO), education contains

only five categories (lower, lower secondary, higher secondary, higher,

university) and occupation eight, based on the British social economic

classification. The age variable is continuous.

3 The questions are: Belgium should not have guest workers, Immigrants

cannot be trusted, Guest workers threaten work of Belgians, Guest workers

exploit social security, Muslims a threat to our culture, Repatriate guest

workers when less jobs, No political activities for immigrants, More conditions

to become a Belgian (ISPO/PIOP, 2002). The value of Cronbachs alpha,

measuring the reliability of the compound scale, is 0.92.

27

4 As we only retained the municipalities of Flanders and the Brussels Capital

Region with a minimum of ten interviewees, our analysis started with ninety-

six municipalities and 2,113 interviewees.

5 While the residuals on the individual level are by far the most important, the

variance on the municipal level is, in this first model, also significant at the

0.01 level for the intercept, nearly significant at the 0.1 level for income, and

significant at the 0.05 level for the interaction term between income and

intercept. ethnocentrism can therefore not only be explained by individual

characteristics, but is context-related too. This is still the case when, in a

second model, other socio-economic variables such as age, gender,

occupation and education, are added to the analysis (model 2 in table 1).

6 We have changed the names of the respondents to guarantee their

anonymity.

7 Not all respondents were afraid in the city. One woman from Rotselaar, for

example, liked to go shopping in the Brabantstraat in Brussels, while another

one was not afraid in the area around the Brussels South Station. The

concentration of foreigners is in both neighborhoods among the highest in

Belgium (Kesteloot, 2006).

8 The percentages on the graph are the weighted means of the results of the

VB in those municipal elections where the party had a list of candidates. The

28

six spatial entities on the graph have been defined by Van Hecke (1998) and

Van der Haegen, Van Hecke and Juchtmans (1996). The agglomeration is the

continuous built-up area around the central city, while the banlieue consists of

morphologically rural municipalities functionally integrated with the central city.

The commuter zone is less influenced by suburbanization, but a lot of its

inhabitants work in the central city. The Brussels Capital Region is not

included because the region is bilingual and most people do not vote for

Flemish parties.

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