Chapter 4
Fear Masquerading as Tolerance
Neutrality and political correctness—The criminalization of opinion—Grievance groups—Diversity and self-loathing—Second-class citizens
A central problem in welcoming people from poor countries is that Europeans have lost faith in parts of the civilization to which migrants were drawn in the first place. “Europeans would like to exit from history, from la grande histoire, from the history that is written in letters of blood,” wrote the French political scientist Raymond Aron in the 1970s. “Others, by their hundreds of millions, wish to enter it.” It is hard to follow Europe’s rules and embrace Europe’s values, as newcomers are sometimes told they must, when Europeans themselves are rewriting those rules and reassessing those values.
Some kind of ethnic conflict simmers in every country where there has been mass immigration. Understanding why requires looking back at the intellectual and moral climate of Europe over the last six decades. The Europe into which immigrants began arriving in the 1950s was reeling in horror from World War II and preoccupied with building the institutions to forestall any repetition of it. NATO was the most important of these institutions. The European Union, then in embryo, was the most ambitious. The war supplied European thinkers with all their moral categories and benchmarks, whether the issue at hand was the progress of civilization, criteria for ethical statesmanship, or rationales for military intervention. Avoiding another European explosion meant, above all, purging Europe’s individual countries of nationalism, with “nationalism” understood to include all vestiges of racism, militarism, and cultural chauvinism—but also patriotism, pride, and unseemly competitiveness. The singing of national anthems and the waving of national flags became, in some countries, the province only of skinheads and soccer hooligans.
Prompted by the United States, which was addressing its own race problem at the time, and with the threat of Communism concentrating their minds, Europeans began to articulate a code of “European values” such as individualism, democracy, freedom, and human rights. These values were never defined with much precision. Yet they seemed to permit social cohesion, and their embrace coincided with sixty years of peace. Whether credit for that peace belongs to European values or U.S. military power is a trickier question.
The end result of these efforts was the European Union, which by the first decade of the twenty-first century had grown to twenty-seven countries. It was an elite project, designed by statesmen and diplomats—and a moralistic one. Those who dissented from it stood accused not of poor judgment but of corrupt morals, of wishing to send the continent back to the horrors of the twentieth century. In a speech at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in May 2005, on the eve of a Europe-wide series of constitutional referenda on the EU, Sweden’s European commissioner, Margot Wallström, warned that any hesitation in surrendering national sovereignty to Europe-wide bodies such as the EU would risk another Holocaust.
Architects and supporters of the “European project” did not hide their virtues under a bushel. “The European Dream is a beacon of light in a troubled world,” wrote Jeremy Rifkin, an American-born author who advised Romano Prodi when Prodi was European Commission president. “It beckons us to a new age of inclusivity, diversity, quality of life, deep play, sustainability, universal human rights, the rights of nature, and peace on Earth.” The New Labour strategist Mark Leonard describes Europe as superior to its rivals in its “ability to attract others and through that to set the rules for the global economy.”
But attraction and admiration are not synonyms. There are lots of reasons immigrants might come to Europe besides a desire to live by its rules. In a barroom at 2 a.m., a pretty woman has an “ability to attract” quite independent of her values. The Ottoman Empire and China both had a power of attraction for Westerners in the nineteenth century. But it was not out of any admiration for their systems of government or their ideals of human rights that Europeans signed treaties with, settled in, and disrupted the national lives of those countries. It was because they were rich places too weak and disorganized to look out for themselves.
Neutrality and political correctness
The “European project” was not dreamt up with immigrants in mind, but it wound up setting the rules under which they were welcomed. Postwar Europe was built on an intolerance of intolerance—a mindset that has been praised as anti-racism and anti-fascism, and ridiculed as political correctness. Our interest here is neither to defend it as common sense nor to reject it as claptrap. It is to understand, first, what Europe was thinking when it welcomed immigrants in such numbers—since this is something it would not have done at any previous moment in its history—and, second, what grounds Europe had for dealing with newcomers in the often naive and overindulgent way it did.
Postwar Europeans behaved as if no one’s culture was better than anyone else’s. In 1996, the Dutch cabinet held that “the debate over multi-culturality must be conducted starting from the principle that cultures”—presumably all of them—“are of equal value.” Native cultures would not be favored over those of newcomers. The state would confront matters of immigration and ethnicity with a scrupulous neutrality, aided only by a set of “universal values” supposedly common to all cultures. It seemed inappropriate to force—or even to persuade—immigrants to assimilate into the old nationalistic loyalties that Europeans themselves were abandoning. “We’re not going to bother Turkish children with the Occupation, are we?” asked one Dutch administrator during a discussion about multicultural education. During a debate over immigration in Catalonia in 2006, one Socialist leader asked mockingly whether immigrants would be tested on their knowledge of the “Virolai,” Jacint Verdaguer’s hymn to Our Lady of Montserrat.
Just because they were migrating to Europe did not mean immigrants accepted, understood, or even noticed the European project to leave behind “the history written in letters of blood.” On the contrary, many immigrants, and many children and grandchildren of immigrants, considered it a duty to shout from the rooftops their wish for a Palestinian state or a Kurdish homeland or an Islamist Algeria. They kept alive dreams of cultural, national, and even racial glory that were beyond the reach of Europeans’ universalism because they were beyond the reach of Europeans’ understanding. The misunderstanding was mutual.
In the name of universalism, many of the laws and customs that had held European societies together were thrown out the window. Tolerance became a higher priority than any of the traditional preoccupations of state and society—order, liberty, fairness, and intelligibility—and came to be pursued at their expense. Around the turn of the century, Europe’s ideology of neutrality buckled under the weight of mass immigration, and became a source not of strength but of what Alsana, the bitchy Bengali housewife in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, called “hosh-kosh nonsense.” Looking around her diverse and bien-pensant London neighborhood, Alsana thinks: “No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the cellars while windows were smashed.”
The term “political correctness” was borrowed from American debates to describe the contortions of logic that European universalism required. No one has ever been quite satisfied with the expression. Maybe it is an unduly harsh way to describe the well-intentioned white lies, wishful thinking, and petty misstatements of the sort that used to be called “talking out of one’s hat.” The musician Billy Bragg, for instance, declared at a forum on British identity, “When Churchill talked of ‘their finest hour,’ he meant 500 million men and women of different languages and cultures, all coming together on our small island to fight fascism.” (No, he didn’t, someone should have replied.) France’s minister for equal opportunity, Azouz Begag, after nationwide riots in France in the autumn of 2005, called for the collection of data by race, asserting, “Diversity is not about charity, it’s about profitability.” (No, it isn’t.)
Political correctness is often ridiculous. There was a campaign waged by the Dutch Honor and Reparation society against Zwarte Piet, the soot-colored sidekick of Saint Nicholas, who, according to centuries-old holiday-season folklore, takes bad children to Spain in a sack—a variant of the German-American legend that Santa Claus will put coal in the Christmas stockings of children who misbehave. “If you want to create a multicultural society,” complained the leader of Dutch Honor and Reparation, “you can’t have holidays every year that remind blacks of the slavery era.” In the British Midlands, the town of Dudley banned certain toys and images from its municipal offices after a Muslim employee complained about a colleague’s keeping a picture of Piglet (the Winnie-the-Pooh character) on her desk. For similar fear of giving offense to Muslims, authorities in Derby decided against restoring the statue of a Florentine boar that had stood in the city’s arboretum since 1840 and had been damaged in World War II. (They reversed their decision after a petition drive.) In late 2007, the British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons was arrested and threatened with whipping in Sudan, for having presided over a class of seven-year-olds that voted to name their teddy bear “Mohammed.” Even when political correctness showed a tendency to authoritarian excess, its self-important perpetrators resembled Gilbert and Sullivan characters more than Stalinist henchmen.
Yet these were serious matters. A new, uncompromising ideology was advancing under cover of its own ridiculousness—not as the Big Lie of legend, perhaps, but as something similarly ominous that might be called the Big Joke. As anyone could see, its advance was also accompanied by intimidation and fear. The European Union and the Dutch lower house held anguished debates on how words such as jihad and terrorism should be used, if at all. In 2008, the British home secretary, Jacqui Smith, stopped using the phrase “Islamic terrorism” and began calling it “anti-Islamic activity” instead. Two years before, Britain had passed its Law Against Incitement to Religious Hatred, which as originally drafted had aimed (but, after emendation, failed) to criminalize criticism of Islam. The columnist Melanie Phillips was right when she said, “The term ‘politically correct’ does not do justice to this sinister, totalitarian project.”
By the turn of the century, immigration was an area where even mild dissent against the status quo could be met with sharp condemnations. In a seldom-remarked passage of his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, Enoch Powell paused from his rant against immigration to address the question of freedom of expression:
In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people, writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk either penalties or reprisals if they were known to have done so.
The range of opinions on immigration and ethnicity was, beyond any doubt, narrowing dramatically. Was this narrowing something European publics had assented to or submitted to? Had they been convinced or coerced? Were they acquiring manners or losing liberties? This is always a hard line to draw. As Tocqueville remarked of the collapse of Christianity at the end of the Ancien Régime, “Those who kept the old faith worried they would be the last to remain faithful. Fearing isolation more than error, they joined the crowd without thinking like it. The sentiments of what was still only a part of the nation therefore seemed the opinion of all, and appeared irresistible to the very people who had given it this false appearance.”
The criminalization of opinion
Over time, the ideology of tolerance changed in two ways. First, it broadened. The classes of people entitled to protection from intolerance grew, and what constituted an offense against tolerance became arbitrary and ad hoc. In the “Macpherson inquiry,” ordered by the British Home Office into the grisly, unsolved 1993 murder of the black Londoner Stephen Lawrence, a racist incident was defined as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.” This definition of racism—that it was whatever anyone said it was—became the working norm in many European countries. There was a new “expanded list of the rights of man,” in Pierre-André Taguieff’s phrase.
Second, the ideology hardened. It developed real powers of enforcement, partly because it was codified into law, and partly because non-governmental groups acted as freelance enforcers. Offenses against the ideology of tolerance now brought not just criticism and ostracism but the possibility of lost livelihoods and encounters with public authorities.
Where these two tendencies—the broadening and the hardening—interacted, the result was severe punishment for conduct that had been until quite recently considered normal. Gay rights is the most extreme example of this process. By 2006, a British husband-and-wife team of Christian evangelists in Britain had been interrogated for eighty minutes by police on the suspicion that the literature they were distributing showed “potentially homophobic attitudes;” a sixty-three-year-old Lutheran preacher in Sweden had been condemned to a month of prison for citing the Bible’s disapproval of homosexuality; and Christian Vanneste, a member of the French National Assembly who had said he found “heterosexuality superior to homosexuality on the moral level,” had become the first Frenchman convicted of homophobia. What had been a consensus opinion of humanity, from the dawn of civilization until the tail end of the twentieth century, was suddenly, at the beginning of the twenty-first, a crime punishable by imprisonment.
On matters of race and immigration, rules were renegotiated almost as quickly. In 1984, Ray Honeyford, a popular head teacher at an ethnically mixed school in Bradford, England, published an article in the Salisbury Review in which he attacked certain remedies of what he called the “race-relations lobby” He argued—much as Daniel Patrick Moynihan had done in his 1965 report The Negro Family—that activist government policies could harm the minorities they were intended to help. Neglect, indifference, and hostility did not explain all the failures of Pakistani and West Indian students, Honeyford wrote. Since they needed to acculturate themselves to British styles of learning, programs urging them to take pride in their native cultures and in British ghetto culture—what we would today call “multiculturalism”—could hinder them in school, and further segregate them from society at large. Honeyford turned out to be right. The mixed student body he described a quarter century ago is mixed no more—or at least it has very few children of English ancestry in it—and the school has been renamed the Iqra School, following the wishes of the overwhelmingly Muslim community it serves. But being right, not to mention well liked among students of all backgrounds, did not save Honeyford from being fired.
In 1990, France’s National Assembly crossed a new frontier. In the interest of repressing “all racist, anti-Semitic or xenophobic acts,” it passed a law, sponsored by the Communist deputy Jean-Claude Gayssot, that rolled back certain guarantees of the 109-year-old Law on the Liberty of the Press. The Gayssot law criminalized not just an act but an attitude or a belief, specifically the denial of the Nazi Holocaust. Germany and Switzerland soon followed suit, and then other countries, so that denying (or minimizing the seriousness of) the Holocaust became an offense in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Switzerland. It was under such laws that the British historian David Irving was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in Austria in 2006. (He served less than a year.)
France had been embarrassed by a number of fringe intellectuals and ex-Vichy politicians claiming the Holocaust had never happened. The law may have seemed like a reasonable tool for imposing decency on the public. It was not. The late historian Madeleine Rebérioux, a biographer of the great Dreyfusard socialist Jean Jaurès, warned against the Gayssot law as soon as it was passed. It should go without saying that neither Rebérioux (who came from a celebrated family of résistants and concentration-camp deportees) nor any of the many other historians who opposed the Gayssot law claimed there was the slightest scholarly value to letting people pretend the Holocaust hadn’t happened. The problem, rather, was political. “The USSR paid a high enough price for its behavior in such matters that France should not wish to follow in its footsteps,” Rebérioux later wrote. “One day, [the law] is going to lead into other areas besides the genocide against the Jews—other genocides and other assaults on what will be called ‘historical truth.’”
She was right. In 1995, a French court condemned the Anglo-American historian Bernard Lewis—the West’s preeminent authority on twentieth-century Turkey—for failing to apply the term genocide to Turks’ massacres of Armenians on the eve of the Kemalist revolution. A law declaring those massacres a “genocide” passed in 2001; five years later, the National Assembly voted to subject anyone who denied that definition to a year’s imprisonment and €45,000 in fines (although this bill did not become law). Another 2001 law defined the slave trade as a “crime against humanity;” in 2005, as a sop to those nostalgic for colonialism, legislation mandated that teachers stress the “positive role” of the French presence in North Africa.
Once the Gayssot law passed, it became hard to make a strong case against an endless criminalization of opinion, as Rebérioux had warned it would. The episodes upon which grievance groups sought to impose an official truth—the massacres of Armenians, the horrors of colonialism, the slave trade—were every bit as real as the Holocaust. If France really wished to stamp out all racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism, why the focus on the Holocaust? One could counter that, since Holocaust denial generally arises from anti-Semitism, and since anti-Semitism has such a clear record of corrupting Western political systems, France had a special stake in preventing it from rearing its head. One could also note that nobody actually did deny that slavery or colonialism took place.
But various ethnic lobbies read the Gayssot law as a challenge to “rank” their own sufferings alongside those of the Jews. One association of “Sons and Daughters of the African Deported” created a Hebrew-sounding word for historic slave transports that might better vie with the resonant Shoah, as the Holocaust is known in France. They took to calling slave runs the “Yovodah.” In 2005, the most eminent French historian of slavery, Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, criticized the 2001 slave-trade law in an interview. A pressure group of “descendants of slaves” took him to court for “disputing a crime against humanity.” Many claimed, following the American black Muslim preacher Louis Farrakhan, that Jews were responsible for the entire Western slave trade. The radical comedian Dieudonné Mbala-Mbala, leader of an Afro-French agitation group called Les Indigènes de la République, said, “Africans are forbidden to look in their archives, as Palestinians are forbidden to return to their lands.”
The Gayssot law was set up to defeat a straw man. It addressed tendencies of the 1930s (populism, nationalism, fascism) that, by the turn of the century, were long discredited and confined to a few isolated cranks. The problems of the twenty-first century (immigration, Islamism, bankruptcy of welfare states, financial panic, and the every-man-for-himself feeling that people got living in a consumer society) were different. There was a new cast of extremists. Many of them—like those anti-Semitic “descendants of slaves”—were adept at serving their own ends by gaming a legal system focused on the ills of seventy-five years ago. Each new officialization of remembrance summoned into being more “moral lobbies,” as they came to be known in France, which pressed their claims with ever more insistence and clout, in ever more central areas of political life. Serious threats to freedom could arise while Europe was keeping under surveillance a collection of aging “fascist” buffoons. Arise they did.
Grievance groups
In the three decades that preceded the financial crisis of 2008, for reasons that have to do with globalization and technological change, authority migrated away from government and toward private interest groups. This drift, whether or not it persists, has been part of the spirit of the age. It has proceeded under governments of all ideological colorations, in domains ranging from diplomacy (consider the influence on aid to Africa exercised by the singer Bono) to residential zoning (consider the spread, in all Western countries, of “gated communities” with highly elaborated codes of private law). In the business of tolerance and race relations, too, non-governmental groups have taken over important state functions, and have proliferated to the point where, in French, they are called simply les associations.
The Communist-inspired Movement against Racism and for Friendship among the Peoples (MRAP), founded in France in 1949 to fight racism and anti-Semitism, came in later decades to play a different role. In 2002, the journalist Oriana Fallaci wrote an incendiary response to the attacks on the World Trade Center in the pages of the Milan-based daily Corriere della Sera. When republished in book form as The Rage and the Pride, it became one of the bestselling nonfiction books in postwar Europe. MRAP sued her under laws against incitement to racial hatred and sought to block publication.
There was racism in Fallaci’s book. “Thank God,” she wrote in a notorious footnote, “I’ve never had anything to do with an Arab man. In my opinion, there is something about Arab men that is disgusting to women of good taste.” And there was other language that, while not racist, seemed to be written with maximum possible uncouthness to give maximum possible offense, as when she described pious Muslims as “the gentlemen who, instead of contributing to the progress of humanity, spend their time with their behinds in the air, praying five times a day” Still other language had a racist “ring” to it without being racist in any strict sense, as when Fallaci wrote that the disciples of Islamic fundamentalism were “multiplying like protozoa.”
But The Rage and the Pride was not just a racist tract, and Fallaci was assailed for far more (i.e., for far less) than racism. One of the opinions that offended MRAP, for instance, was: “Any theologian can tell you that the Koran authorizes lies, calumny and hypocrisy in defense of the faith.” Another was that radical Muslims are “everywhere, and the most hardened of them are living among us.” While open to discussion, these were absolutely defensible points. Many scholars of Islam, not to mention Islamic theologians, do indeed say that there is a role for so-called taqqiya dissimulation in defending the faith. Few Islamologists can have had a deeper love of Muslim culture than the late Marshall G. S. Hodgson of the University of Chicago, and here is what he writes about taqqiya in his magnum opus, The Venture of Islam:
Many of the Shi’is who also had to accommodate themselves to authority which they could not in conscience accept, had developed the notion of taqiyyah, pious dissimulation of one’s true opinions. It was not only to protect oneself but also to protect the community of which one was a member that a Shi’i was urged to practice taqiyyah dissimulation over against Sunni majorities or Sunni governments: at the least, not to press on their attention the Shi’i belief that the established Islam and the established government were illegitimate and should, in principle, be overthrown in the name of the imam.
Fallaci’s point about dangerous radicals in the West, meanwhile, was made around the time that the Syrian-born radical Omar Bakri, who would be barred from England shortly after the terrorist attacks of July 7, 2005, told the London Arabic daily Al-Hayat, “Allah willing, we will transform the West into Dar Al-Islam by means of invasion from without. If an Islamic state arises and invades, we will be its army and its soldiers from within.”
MRAP’s suit was launched as part of a campaign against “Islamophobia”—a neologism often heard in the months after the September 11 attack. It threatened to erase the distinction between the criticism of minorities on intolerant grounds and the criticism of any minority on any grounds. It threatened to extend the de facto censorship that already existed on matters of race to matters of religion and beyond—to political acts done in religion’s name. Islamism was getting the best of both worlds. While government officials refused to link the words Islamic and terrorism, the fact that the terrorists themselves claimed a religious motivation gave them a measure of immunity from criticism. Fallaci was placed in the position where she had to demonstrate her “reasonableness” before warning Europeans about a dangerous and violent political movement in their midst. Although MRAP’s suit failed, it opened the question of whether there was any language in which one could criticize Islamist violence without finding oneself in a courtroom. Islamophobia was an accusation that could be—and was—leveled at those who expressed worry over suicide terrorism in the Middle East or anti-Semitic attacks by Arab youths in Paris. Europe’s toleration laws were beginning to work to the advantage of the intolerant.
The “Finkielkraut affair,” which raged in France in the days after the nationwide ghetto riots of 2005, was another landmark. It showed that, to incur the wrath of the “anti-racist” establishment, it was not necessary to show even a hint of racism. The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in which he dissented from the prevailing view that the riots had been a “rebellion” against social conditions. Finkielkraut noted that that was not the way the rioters themselves described it. In their rap lyrics and their slogans against France and Frenchness, many had cast their deeds in ethno-religious terms. “Imagine for a moment that they were whites, like in Rostock in Germany,” he added. “Right away, everyone would have said: ‘Fascism won’t be tolerated.’” Finkielkraut also questioned the logic behind the argument, put forward by other French intellectuals, that the modern exclusion of immigrants was a mere continuation of colonial conditions. “Okay,” he said, “but one mustn’t forget that the integration of Arab workers in France during the time of colonial rule was much easier.”
Finkielkraut is mild-mannered and moderate, much less prone to egotistical media “interventions” than most of his philosophical contemporaries, and has spent much of his career unraveling the ethical and metaphysical problems that arise from totalitarian violence. When Le Monde reported on the interview and excerpted from it, though, he was subjected to a campaign of vilification. The Nouvel Observateur magazine called him a “neo-reactionary” A letter to the editor of the daily Libération attacked him as “belonging to that very French tradition of writers who, sunk in deep despair, abandon humanistic ideals.” Another compared Finkielkraut to a functionary of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s fascistic National Front. That is all a normal, if scurrilous, part of French public debate. What made the affair so sinister was its legal aspect. MRAP announced its intentions to sue Finkielkraut, along with Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, a member of the Académie Française who had made some rather rash statements that the riots were linked to the practice of polygamy among Muslim immigrants, for incitement to racial hatred.
That MRAP dropped its threat to sue just days after issuing it indicates that it did not have much of a case. But that is small consolation. No one believed that would stop the routine judicial harassment of any intellectual (or ordinary citizen) with the temerity to put forward a dissenting explanation of France’s worst social problem. The “minority rights” in the name of which people could be sued consisted, first and foremost, of the right of banlieue rioters not to be made uncomfortable by the right of free speech. Here was another instance in which institutions established to promote tolerance had begun to work against the tolerance they proclaimed.
The policing of tolerance had no inbuilt limits and no obvious logic. Why was “ethnic pride” a virtue and “nationalism” a sickness? Why was an identity like “Sinti/Roma” legitimate but an identity like “white” out of bounds? Why had it suddenly become criminal to ask questions today that it was considered a citizen’s duty to ask ten years ago? Erudite philosophers of tolerance such as Jürgen Habermas might possibly have been able to untangle such questions and draw the proper distinctions. Political elites could resolve them by fiat. But they left the person of average intellect and social status feeling confused and disempowered. A democracy cannot long tolerate a system that makes an advanced degree in sociology or a high government position a prerequisite for expressing the slightest worry about the way one’s country is going.
The virtues of the multicultural era were elite virtues. The British political scientist Geoff Dench suspected, with good reason, that favoring elites was a large part of the point of multiculturalism. Conflicts in a striving meritocracy, he noted:
can probably be managed much more easily where there are groups whose membership of the nation is ambiguous, who are very dependent on elite sponsorship, and whose presence flushes out ethnocentric responses among the masses which can then be held against them. A society tied to the notion of meritocracy may therefore have a particular need for minorities.
As the main way this need for minorities was supplied, immigration became a pivot point of all European politics, not just immigration politics. That was a big difference between Europe’s challenges and similar American ones. In the United States, there was a “race problem” and there was an “immigration problem,” and the two did not always have much to do with one another. Even if they were sometimes confused, they could generally be disentangled by people of good faith. In Europe, the immigration problem was the race problem. So declaring immigration a success and an “enrichment” became the only acceptable opinion to hold. To hold immigration a failure was to reveal oneself a racist; to express misgivings about immigration was to confess racist inclinations. The philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff coined the term immigrationisme to describe the regnant ideology that immigration is always “both inevitable and good.” People still talked about immigration and its consequences, but only along preapproved lines. Real discussions—about the increasing “diversity” of European society and whether it was a good or a bad thing—were all but shut down.
Diversity and self-loathing
Diversity described both a sociological reality (there were more foreign-looking people around) and an ideology (there ought to be more foreign-looking people around). The ideology was perfectly in tune with the neutrality among cultures espoused by the builders of the European ideal. Diversity, though, could never really be a stable or neutral ideal because Europeans did not know enough about other cultures to make it one. Diversity meant rooting out traditions that excluded people and trammeled the liberties of newcomers. All cultures have many such traditions. But while Europeans could easily dismantle their own prejudices, the prejudices of other ethnic groups were, quite naturally, invisible to them. At the heart of European universal-ism was European provincialism.
Europeans who considered churches houses of stupidity, sexism, and superstition didn’t know enough about mosques or ashrams to form a judgment, and left them unmolested. They abolished the old and much-mocked nationalistic school lessons about the virtues of nos ancêtres les gaulois, but absorbed the new lessons about the virtues of other cultures, and the justice and nobility of exotic political causes, with a childish credulity. Immigrants could indulge certain comforting prejudices, myths, and traditions that natives would be disciplined, chastised, ostracized, or jailed for indulging. Effectively, diversity meant taking old hierarchies and inverting them.
The European obsession with Third World “causes” was a function of Europe’s new, guilt-based moral order. Immigrants and their children were at liberty to express politically their wishes as a people, in a way that European natives were not. Grim-faced censure was always at the ready for Europeans who indulged in the merest nostalgic buffoonery, like that of the UK Independence Party, which favored nothing more radical than pulling Britain out the European Union. The only national claims that could be made without provoking accusations of nationalism, racism, or xenophobia were those of foreigners. With their own nationalisms off limits, many Europeans were tempted to embrace vicariously the nationalisms of others—particularly Palestinian nationalism, which, in its most radical versions, allowed Europeans to reconnect with a discredited strand of European nationalism, anti-Semitism.
Where it interacted with immigration, there was an illogic at the heart of diversity. If diversity “enriched” and “strengthened” nations as much as everyone claimed, why would any nation ever want its immigrants to integrate into the broader society? That would be drawing down the nation’s valuable fund of diversity. In this regard Ethiopians are for serving Ethiopian food, and helping substantiate the boasts of suburban school administrators that “our students speak 170 languages in the home”—not for taking jobs as marketing managers and dental hygienists. Or was the supply of diversity meant to remain—via immigration—permanently on tap? No European public wanted that. So European leaders defended large-scale immigration in one breath by saying it would make their countries different (through diversity), and in the next by saying it would leave them the same (through integration).
Diversity won its most heartfelt assent at the level of consumerism—primarily cuisine and fashion. In the 1950s and 1960s, before immigrants had changed European culture in any significant way, Europeans were immensely grateful for the novelties they brought—from samba to hashish to baba ghanoush. But from the 1960s on, immigration became less and less about curiosities that shoppers could take or leave, and more and more about the core structures of society—the welfare system, the prosperity of important industries, the resources various European economies brought to world trade, the principles of rights that governed transactions between individuals. Bizarrely, as immigration began to change Europe at its economic and cultural core, the political vocabulary remained the same as when immigration had been a fringe phenomenon. People kept talking about restaurants.
In essence, diversity was mere exoticism, an exoticism that declared itself sober and reasonable and kind rather than frivolous and exploitative and colonialist. The influence of young ethnics on fashion was extreme. In the poorest neighborhoods in France, young people’s spending on fashion averaged €200 per month and outlays of €600 were not uncommon. Every country had a name for fashions that had started off as the uniform of ghetto youth and had become the mode of a big part of the young native-born mainstream. In France it was le look banlieue; in Britain, kids who flaunted designer clothing were called “chavs;” in Holland and elsewhere, a British company called Lonsdale made a killing dressing up thuggish teenagers in rap-style pseudo-athletic clothing.
Non-European immigrants may not have been enviable in a socioeconomic way, but they were enviable in an existential way. They were cooler. They were aristocrats of identity. This was the message of a fascinating newspaper, Gringo, that was founded in the heavily immigrant suburbs of Stockholm. The ghettoized svartkalle—“black head,” in the Swedish slang—was stereotypically downtrodden and excluded. But the pages of Gringo were full of braggadocio trying to pass itself off as self-deprecation. Ethnic Swedes were patronizingly called Svennar, the “Svens,” much as American ghetto slang used to refer to white people as “Chuck.” Native Swedes were clueless people who probably didn’t know how to dance. Every issue carried the motto Sveriges svenskaste tidning (“Sweden’s Most Swedish Paper”). The newspaper’s editor, Zanyar Adami, sometimes said that Gringo’s project was to create a new Swedish national identity. This meant, one assumes, getting rid of the dead weight of the old one.
Second-class citizens
Mass revolution, and the demographic revolution it brought, had long been defended as a means of giving the continent a much-needed transfusion of youth. But how much youth did Europe need? And what did Europe need it for? Was it for measurable efficiencies? Or was it simply to provide a rush of dynamism and excitement to a society too old and tired to provide such things for itself? Corinne Hofmann’s erotic autobiography, The White Masai—which describes how, on a holiday trip to Kenya, she cast her eyes on the bejeweled body of a young tribesman and, enchanted, decided to abandon her life in Switzerland—did not just reflect Hofmann’s own tastes, but the entire German-speaking world’s. The book sold 4 million copies and spent years on German-language bestseller lists. As Kingsley Amis wrote in a similar context, one can understand why Europeans like this sort of thing; the question is why they like it so much.
Europeans began to feel contemptible and small, ugly and asexual. They viewed themselves much as their nineteenth-century forebears had viewed the “savage” peoples in their empires. The brilliant novels of Michel Houellebecq, which minutely dissected such worries, sold millions of copies not just in France but all over Europe. The hero of The Elementary Particles (1998), for instance, describes the waves of cultural anguish and sexual insecurity he feels while teaching Proust and the French classics to a largely immigrant-descended high school class outside of Paris. No one is interested in Proust, and the girl he has a crush on fawns over a macho African student (“this baboon,” in the narrator’s description) who holds him in contempt. Houellebecq’s teacher comes to suspect the high European culture he is peddling might be worthless:
What was a banker, a minister, an executive compared to a movie actor or a rock star? Financially, sexually and in every respect a loser. The strategies of distinction so subtly described by Proust no longer made the slightest sense.…Proust remained radically European. He was, along with Thomas Mann, one of the last Europeans. What he wrote no longer had any relation to reality whatsoever.
In 2005 the novelist Matthias Politycki wrote an essay called “White Man, What Now?” It conveyed a message similar to Houellebecq’s about who really feels inferior when Europeans confront non-Europeans. While researching a novel set in Cuba, Politycki writes, he came to look at the vitality of poor, dark people not just with fear but also with a kind of envy. Politycki stressed that he was using skin color “only in a metaphorical sense”—but, of course, cultural discussions of skin color are always metaphorical. He wrote:
The brutality of the raw life that took no heed of the moral or esthetic standards of an Old European, the unbridled wildness of will that frequently expressed itself as outright violence…Was I supposed to sneer at this as a lack of culture? Or must I marvel at it as a surplus of vitality, in the face of which I was a loser from the get-go.…Sometimes I was so completely humiliated by these eruptions of physical force that I tried to persuade myself that I carried in my white skin the whole epochal exhaustion of the Old World. But dressing up my weakness in the face of reality as the superiority of a refined reason didn’t help at all.
Variants of this experience haunt Politycki everywhere he goes in the Third World. In Burundi, he has the vague sense of a lurking physical threat. But he and his scared Western traveling companions would not have wanted a weapon to use in self-defense, he confesses, because they would have lacked the will to use it. In the Far East, Politycki is shocked by the hardworking inhabitants’ “unbridled energy, which provokes not any particular ethical reflections so much as a basic feeling of impotence.” In the Arab world, he is unnerved by the sexual energy of—in particular—Moroccans. “What is troubling about these travel experiences,” he writes, “is less the shame in the face of an unbridled virility but the bitter feeling we get at the weakness of our culture—or, better, of our worldview.”
The word Politycki most often uses to describe poor people is “unbridled;” his word for Westerners is “camouflaged.” Reason and enlightenment and “individualism,” he comes to believe, sap Europeans’ vital energy without extinguishing their admiration for vital energy. So making extravagant claims for the European way requires an ever-ramifying system of lies and rationalizations. “Whether a completely enlightened (read: godless) society has anything of value to set against a semi-enlightened one,” he writes, “is a basic problem that has accompanied many advanced cultures to their doom.”
In the hands of Politycki and other Eurpoeans, multiculturalism became almost (if one will pardon the expression) a self-directed xenophobia. This tendency was visible throughout society, as the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger was among the first to note. “The defense of immigrants is always carried off with a moralizing flourish and a maximum of self-righteousness,” wrote Enzensberger. “Slogans like ‘Foreigners, don’t leave us alone with the Germans!’ and ‘Germany—never again’ testify to a pharisaical reversal. It is the photographic negative of a racist cliché.”
Ordinary people have a hard time consulting principles before acting. They repair to “friend-or-foe” heuristics and rules of thumb. By now it is almost second nature for Westerners to assume that anything familiar, traditional, and Western is to be opposed; and anything discomfort-inducing and foreign is to be protected. So in 2006, Nadia Eweida, a British Airways stewardess and an Egyptian Christian, was suspended from work without pay for wearing the cross, although the airline permits its Muslim employees to wear hijabs and headscarves. (After several days of tabloid outrage, the airline backed down and re-hired her.) The BBC forced a Christian woman to remove her cross in the office, although it, too, allows headscarves. Europeans were coming to despise their own cultures, much as the bigots among their forebears had despised the cultures of other peoples.
The German jurist Udo di Fabio warned in 2005 that the language of multiculturalism and diversity “opens the gates to a new Middle Ages, in which the model is not the human individual but the harmonious ordering of groups.” And the way the groups were ordered often left natives feeling like second-class citizens in their own countries. According to a report of the British government’s Office of Communities and Local Government in 2008, “White people are less likely to feel they can influence decisions at the local level than people from minority ethnic groups (37 percent compared to 45 percent). White people are also less likely to feel they can influence decisions affecting Great Britain (19 percent compared to 31 percent).” Whites’ relative pessimism about exercising their rights is supposed to strike us as puzzling, or surprising, but of course it is not. It reflects a belief that their aspirations are not the real subject matter of Britain’s politics.
The message that majorities have needs, too, is often unwelcome. Bassam Tibi, a Syrian-born sociologist in Germany, suggested that German culture be understood as the main, or leading, culture (Leitkultur) in Germany’s pluricultural society. Tibi was pilloried for the suggestion that Beethoven and Thomas Mann might deserve a larger role in shaping the national consciousness than foreign voices, as was Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democratic politician who tried to popularize the idea. Europe was a place of aspiration for immigrants, and of deference and restraint for the native born.
The values that were supposed to liberate Europeans had left them paralyzed, until Europeans’ very standing to demand that immigrants adapt to European ways was put in question. “We no longer consider any human action legitimate, or even intelligible,” wrote the philosopher Pierre Manent, “unless it can be shown to be subject to some universal rule of law, or to some universal ethical principle.” This universal ethics had one uncomfortable similarity to religious fundamentalism and the other exclusionary cultures to which it was supposed to be the antidote. For universalism as for religious fundamentalism, Manent noted, “the only truly unforgivable human action is what one used to call conversion. There is no longer any legitimate grounds for change because there is no longer any legitimate grounds for preference.”
Before immigrants could live by European rules, Europeans had to figure out what those rules were. Gordon Brown, in the years before he became Britain’s prime minister, suggested that his countrymen be more explicit about the values and customs that everyone in society ought to respect, no matter what their background. But that was thin gruel, and it was late to make such a suggestion. The old religion-based cultures of Europe performed just the function Brown described until they were questioned in the 1960s and ’70s, in the name of personal liberation and individual autonomy, and then repudiated in the 1980s and ’90s, in the name of making Europe more friendly to minorities. How could Brown now expect immigrants and their children to help revive a culture that natives and their children had done little but snicker at? Especially since there was an alternative source of values that appeared, to many European immigrants, more legitimate, more coherent, and more alive than Europe’s discredited national cultures.