Chapter 11

Liberalism and Diversity

Immigration, Islam, and the European Union—The project to bring Turkey into Europe—Pim Fortuyn and the weakness of the West—“Rightism” and “fascism” in the context of immigration and Islam—The Danish People’s Party—Nicolas Sarkozy and the strength of the republic—Affirmative action

There is increasingly such a thing as “Europe.” The growth of the European Union, global communications, and the spread of English among the continent’s elites have all brought Europeans closer together. And if Henri Pirenne was right that the movement of hostile Muslims northward was responsible for the founding of Europe 1,000 years ago, then the plantation of Islam in Europe and the hostility toward Europe that simmers in much of the Muslim world are likely to revive people’s consciousness of themselves as “European,” whether the EU proves a suitable expression of that allegiance or not.

The immigration problem and the Islam problem are similar in all Western European countries. There are, to be sure, variations. Britain remains, by far, the European country with the most serious dangers of violence and political extremism. Sweden is the country with the most intractable segregation. Spain, because of preexisting problems with national unity, is the country most at risk of being swamped by the sheer volume of immigration. Germany’s Turkish population will succeed but will assimilate more slowly, largely because its own transplanted national culture is too rich and cohesive to give up. France will have spectacular social problems, but its republican traditions give it the best chance of fully assimilating the children and grandchildren of immigrants. It is the only country where a European equivalent of the American dream is likely.

Still, the conditions unifying Europe culturally have not been better for decades, and Islam is part of the reason why. Renewed acquaintance with Islam has given Europeans a stronger idea of what Europe is, because it has given them a stronger idea of what Europe is not.

Immigration, Islam, and the European Union

As we noted earlier, the central political endeavor of almost all Western European countries over the past half century has been the creation of the European Union. The EU arose from a couple of international cooperation agreements in the 1950s. First, the European Coal and Steel Community (1952) sought to bind French and German industry together in a way that would not contribute to a future war, as outright French rule over German industrial areas had done after World War I. Second, the European Economic Community, launched between France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands with the Treaty of Rome (1957), aimed at a more ambitious harmonization of trade regimes. With the Treaty of Maastricht in 1993, the community became the EU, expanding to fifteen countries aiming at an “ever closer union.” At this writing it has twenty-seven.

From its start, the EU was a way of avoiding conflict by getting rid of inefficient economic nationalisms. It has grown—in the minds of its managers, at least—into a project for getting rid of nationalism altogether. But “nationalism” is a thing too vague for bureaucrats to root out. What they can root out is national sovereignty. This the EU did in increasing measure. And that rendered the whole project less and less popular.

The EU was not democratic in any sense in which a neutral observer would use the word. It held elections for a legislature that sat in Strasbourg, but it was not a duly constituted legislature. In 2005, a proposed “constitutional treaty” was scheduled to make it one. It would have formalized the role of the European parliament, and transferred other functions from nation-states to European authorities, under a process that was extremely (many said intentionally) confusing. The treaty was to have been submitted to about half the European voting publics for ratification by referendum. But French voters rejected it by a wide margin and the Dutch rejected it by almost two to one. This experiment in democracy having failed to produce the desired result, all of the other countries that had planned their own referenda (except Luxembourg) canceled them. The only country given a second crack at voting on the substance of ever closer union was Ireland, which happened to be one of the EU’s greatest economic beneficiaries. But the Irish, too, rejected the constitution (repackaged as “the Lisbon treaty”) by resounding margins in the spring of 2008.

It had always been assumed that the great potential obstacle to the European “project” would be the reemergence of ancient national rivalries. These threatened to expose the contradictions and trade-offs in the EU project and undermine the most far-reaching ambitions for it. In the end immigration played as disruptive a role as nationalism did.

The EU stripped national governments of their capacity to carry out two immigration-related duties—defending borders and defending cultures—while failing to develop that capacity at the European level. Citizens of EU countries could settle, vote, work, pay taxes, and collect welfare in whatever other country they chose (although there were transitional regimes for the newest members). Under the various Schengen Agreements negotiated from the 1980s on, border checks between Western European countries (except Britain and Ireland) were abolished. But determining which foreigners would be allowed into the EU in the first place, whether to work or to seek asylum, was left up to the individual nations. At summit after summit, notably at Lisbon in 2000, even the most pro-EU national leaders resolutely refused to surrender their immigration policy to the EU. Their electorates would not permit it. As of this writing, another attempt has been made to harmonize immigration policies, and a common immigration policy is planned for 2010.

The situation that resulted from this mix of democratic self-rule and EU mandates was crazy. It meant that the immigration policy for the whole of Western Europe was set, at any given time, by whichever member state happened to be the most soft-hearted, lax, corrupt, or sanctimonious. At the start of this century, the problem country was Spain. In early 2005, on the eve of the Dutch and French referenda, Spain’s Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero amnestied 700,000 undocumented immigrants. Such amnesties were not new in Spain. The government of Zapateros conservative predecessor, José María Aznar, had passed five of them since the mid-1990s. But Zapateros was simpler, and bigger than all previous amnesties combined. It was also more open to abuse. Announced many months in advance, it gave foreigners—particularly those who were already in other European countries—incentives to enter Spain to lay down a paper trail that would render them undeportable from any European country.

This only looked open-hearted. Ministers and editorial writers in other EU countries noted that Zapatero would reap the credit for his “generosity” but non-Spaniards would pay the bill. Once naturalized, non-Europeans could migrate to other EU countries, such as France, the Netherlands, and Germany, which have more generous welfare systems and better health-care services. (In some cases they were migrating back to these countries, where they had been living illegally, as “Spaniards.”) A year later, when Spain was flooded with African boat people, Zapatero, in effect, admitted his critics were right. His government approached the EU to plead for financial and bureaucratic assistance in policing the flow of Africans. Zapatero complained that “regulating the conditions for entry cannot be the exclusive responsibility of those who are near the gate”—exactly the point that those who had condemned his amnesty had made.

So as a practical matter, EU member states were in a predicament. They had duties to immigrants but no control over how many of them they got. Immigrants had rights that could be claimed in all countries, but responsibilities that could be imposed only locally, and only for as long as they chose to stick around. In remedying this situation, Europeans faced an uncomfortable menu of options: cut welfare and other benefits for everyone, including natives, in order to make one’s home country less attractive to newcomers; pull out of the Schengen Agreements; hand over more power to Europe, in hopes that authorities in Brussels would limit unilateral amnesties; or take their distance from the entire project of building the EU. They chose the last option, and at the first possible opportunity—by pulling the plug on the constitutional referendum.

The project to bring Turkey into Europe

Nothing undermined popular support for the EU more than the decision of the European Commission to declare Turkey a model for the “moderate,” “secular” Islam that Europe aspires to have within its borders, and to proceed with negotiations to admit Turkey to full EU membership. Big pluralities of French and Dutch “no” voters cited Turkey among their primary worries about the EU. Turkey is a fast-growing country. With a projected population of 100 million at mid-century, it would dominate the European parliament from the moment it was admitted. Since the country’s per capita income is only 20 percent of the EU’s, the inflow of laborers would dwarf anything Europe had previously seen. Turkey is European only in the sense that 5 percent of its landmass is west of the Bosporus. The rest of it runs deep into Asia and the Middle East, bordering on Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Its decades-old war against Kurdish separatists will not strike any Irishman or Dane as a patriotic duty to fight in. Turkey is distant culturally, too: 90 percent of Turks would not countenance living next door to a homosexual and 62 percent think it “perfectly acceptable” for a man to have more than one wife.

Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, shortly before he became Pope Benedict XVI, called EU negotiations a “grave error.” They had an “anti-historical” goal, he said, since Turkey’s Islamic roots place it in “permanent contrast to Europe.” He seemed to have a point. Three-quarters (75 percent) of Turks say it is important for Islam to have an influential role in the world. They vote that way, too, as evidenced by their election of three Islamist governments—one radical, two led by today’s more moderate AK party—since the 1990s. Since Kemal Atatürk founded the state in the 1920s, religious moderation has been enforced not by popular consensus but by an army that sees repressing political Islam as its main role. Europeans insisted that Turkey “democratize” in order to join the EU—starting with removing its army from politics. Turkey complied. As popular will has come more and more to the surface, the country has drifted further from the army-imposed “secularism” that was Europe’s main rationale for recruiting it in the first place.

The worry of the European-in-the-street was that if his leaders will call that Europe, they’ll call anything Europe. Continent-wide, only a third of Europeans supported Turkish accession. In not a single country did a democratic majority support Turkish admission to the EU, and in some countries the opposition ran almost five-to-one. The German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Trends survey found that 46 percent of French people said Turkish accession was a “bad thing,” versus just 10 percent who called it a “good thing.” This wholesale public opposition seems to have given no one in the upper reaches of the EU bureaucracy a moment’s pause.

The admission of Turkey turned out to be desperately important to Europe’s Muslim leaders: It would mean not just that a Muslim nation was on good terms with its European neighbors but that Europe had accorded Islam a place as one of “its” religions. As Oguz Ücüncü, a leader of the German wing of the nationalistic religious group Milli Görüs, wrote during the accession negotiations: “If Turkey can’t be a part of Europe, the next step is Muslims can’t.” This may also explain why, even as the EU has fallen to referendum-losing levels of popularity in Europe at large, its popularity among immigrants remains sky-high, reaching 85 percent in some polls, according to the Iranian-Swedish immigration researcher Masoud Kamali. “You are not going to be a Swede,” Kamali explained, “or, at least, it’s not you who’s going to decide if you are a Swede. But perhaps you can choose to be a European.”

An almost inevitable result of heavy immigration is the growth of such legalistic conceptions of identity as Kamali’s. A study on identity done by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a Labour think tank, found that 51 percent of minorities in England considered themselves “British,” versus 29 percent of whites. Meanwhile 52 percent of whites considered themselves “English,” versus 11 percent of minorities. The late Sir Bernard Crick, an education expert and a designer of Britain’s “citizenship curriculum,” noted: “To the immigrant, Britishness is essentially a legal and political structure. It doesn’t mean the culture. When the immigrant says I am British, he is not saying he wants to be English or Scottish or Welsh.”

This was the EU model of belonging: You are one person for your culture and another for the law. You can be an official (legal) European even if you are not a “real” (cultural) European. This disaggregation of the personal personality and the legal personality sounds tolerant and liberating, but it has its downside. Rights are attached to citizenship. As soon as your citizenship becomes a legal construction, so do your rights. They cease to be inalienable. The politics typified by the EU began to crumble when Pim Fortuyn—a flamboyant, gay, ex-Marxist ex–sociology professor—warned that Europe was throwing out the cultural baby along with the nationalist bathwater. There could be no European Union without a European identity.

Pim Fortuyn and the weakness of the West

For decades the Netherlands pursued a consciously multiculturalist policy, called “Integration with Maintenance of One’s Own Identity.” Those who offered even the meekest of warnings that this policy undermined the country’s common culture were routinely censured. As noted earlier, when Frits Bolkestein, the center-right party leader, took the position in the 1990s that Muslim immigrants who had acquired multiple wives abroad should not be allowed to bring them all to the Netherlands, he was rebuked by the youth wing of his party. Any outright opposition to immigration, meanwhile, was held tantamount to inciting racial hatred. Hans Janmaat, who founded the tiny Centrum party in the 1980s on a program of halting immigration, was prosecuted for his views.

That climate of opinion changed all of a sudden. In early 2002, Pim Fortuyn was running for national office as the candidate of the anti-establishment Livable Netherlands party. While he was never particularly pro-American, he had been shaken to the core by the attacks on the World Trade Center the autumn before. He saw the Dutch state’s neutral tolerance of nonnative cultures, especially Muslim cultures, as a mortal threat to the country. Fortuyn’s remarks soon became too radical even for the radicals of Livable Netherlands, and he was forced to run as the candidate of a party he had started himself, the Pim Fortuyn List.

Fortuyn’s view of multiculturalism was original, sophisticated, and confusing. In one sense, it is surprising that it raised any controversy at all. A great beneficiary of multiculturalism, first as a Dutch Catholic and later as a homosexual, he defended the Western system of liberties on precisely the same grounds that the multiculturalist establishment did. He shared their view of Dutch history’s low points—colonialism, colonial war, collaboration with the Nazis. He also shared their view of its high points—increasingly equal treatment for women, non-whites, Jews, and homosexuals.

But here they parted ways. Multiculturalists believed that the new system of rights made the West not just better but stronger. Fortuyn believed that such liberties made the West better but more vulnerable, unless novel arrangements were made to protect it. “We are,” he said, “a lot less powerful than we think.” This reassessment turned the whole Dutch immigration debate on its head. The main danger to the West, he felt, was the Islamic culture imported along with new immigrants and planted in the West by their children. “Our conception of our own culture is becoming dangerously relativistic,” he wrote. “Fundamentalist Islam is not just a considerable cultural, political, economic and military force in the Middle East. It is also gaining ground in North Africa. Our cultural relativists have no response to it, and would rather stick their heads in the sand. There is no reason to doubt, over the long term, that this fundamentalism will grow stronger in our part of the world.”

If the West could not withstand the influence of Islam, which Fortuyn called “a life-threatening culture,” then the wisest course was to minimize exposure to it. This meant examining closely what imams were saying for evidence of subversion, in a way that Fortuyn explicitly compared to the surveillance of Communists during the Cold War. It also meant introducing sharp cultural distinctions into Western immigration policy. “The admission of someone from our own cultural sphere,” he wrote, “is something totally different than the admission of someone from a cultural sphere far removed from ours. A quota policy for the acceptance of asylum-seekers looks inevitable to me.”

In one way, such views made Fortuyn a perfect European. But it was a kind of European-ness incompatible with the treaties and institutions on which the EU was based. Fortuyn called for the Netherlands to withdraw from both the border-opening Schengen Agreements and the 1951 UN convention on refugees. Fortuyn never ignored the Dutch constitution. “If you’re born and raised here, you have citizen’s rights, period,” Fortuyn allowed. “Janmaat certainly went further than that. He wanted to give people [immigrants] a one-way ticket back. You won’t see any of that with me.” Fortuyn was not a racist, and his colorful repartee about the Moroccan men he had slept with was adequate to place him above the suspicion of being one. But, slice it any way you like, his argument was not different from Janmaat s. It was a different style of argument. It was the same argument in a multicultural idiom.

Fortuyn’s idea of multiculturalism was idiosyncratic. “People use the term casually,” he said, “but they’re never able to define it, let alone provide it with a substantial content.” His attempt to provide multiculturalism with such a content revealed a love-hate relationship with the whole constitutional order. Article I of the Dutch constitution forbids discrimination. Fortuyn vacillated between praise for it (as the bulwark of Western rights) and contempt for it (as an obstacle to their protection). He proposed to limit immigration to Holland in the name of openness. He proposed to destroy the global village in order to save it.

The Dutch, who harbored a similar ambivalence, could not get enough of Fortuyn’s kind of talk. As he rose in the polls, it became clear that Holland’s entire multicultural order was being propped up by taboos, not consent, and that most Dutch natives felt immigrants were using Dutch tolerance to take them for a ride. Fortuyn could well have become prime minister had he not been shot dead days before national elections in May 2002, by an animal rights activist who claimed to be acting to protect Dutch Muslims.

It is hard to say what would have come of Fortuyn’s ideas had he lived. Alone among postwar politicians, he managed to start a debate about the very rationale of multiculturalism, about its costs and benefits, and this is a debate that few of its proponents wish to have even today. Essential to figuring Fortuyn out is understanding why he saw Islam as a particular menace for Europe.

Fortuyn’s gripe does not appear to be a matter of doctrines, which he sought persistently to take off the table. He loved to speak of “Judeo-Christian culture,” and of his own Catholic background, but almost never of Judeo-Christian religion. “I speak expressly in terms of culture,” he wrote, “which is a far broader term than religion. Religions can be abandoned, as has happened on a large scale in our country, but a culture can’t be left behind so easily.” These premises are all highly debatable, even dubious. Was that really his problem with talking about religion? Or was it that post-religion—which Fortuyn calls “culture” but which others call “lifestyle”—was the only kind of religion he recognized?

For Fortuyn, multiculturalism was a kind of truce. “Church and religion belong to the private sphere of life, and must not determine the public sphere,” he said. “At the very most they can influence it in a normative way” Culturally, everyone in a multicultural order is disarmed. Just as the classic nation-state was marked by a state monopoly on violence, the multicultural nation-state is marked by a state monopoly on moral order. Any fervently espoused religion threatens that monopoly, as surely as a private militia threatened the old nation-state. Christians and Jews may still worship God privately, but on normative matters, they have surrendered to the new, progressive order. Muslims are distinguished by their refusal to submit to this spiritual disarmament. They stand out as the only implacable source of resistance to multiculturalism in the public sphere. Should the multicultural order fall, Islam is the only value system waiting in the wings. Notice that Fortuyn’s analysis of Islam’s role as an identity of resistance is exactly the same as Tariq Ramadan’s, even if the two have opposite views about whether this is a good thing or not.

Fortuyn saw Islam as Europe’s biggest problem. But his rise revealed a broader problem that Europe would have even if not a single Muslim had ever immigrated there. It was not clear that Europe, as he saw it, was compatible with any religious worldview. He was willing to admit that the individualistic culture he adored arose from Europe’s Christian past. But it was more important to Fortuyn that that culture be past than that it be Christian. In large part, what made Islam intolerable to Fortuyn was that it was a living religion. To him, equal treatment of women, racial nondiscrimination, and (perhaps above all) freedom of sexual comportment are absolute rights. But freedom of religion is now a right whose claims have been rendered relative by the advance of history. Where it clashes with newer “cultural” rights, it must make way. This is to say that freedom of religion has ceased to be a right at all.

“Rightism” and “fascism” in the context
of immigration and Islam

Pim Fortuyn was a battling kind of radical liberal. He was not a fascist, but he was murdered by someone who was under the impression that he was one. Such mislabeling, even when it is not fatal, always clouds discussion of immigration in Europe. The terms fascist, xenophobe, extremist, and radical are applied promiscuously to a wide range of anti-immigrant parties and tendencies, most of which are democratic. There are eccentric hobbyists whose members wouldn’t harm a fly, like the UK Independence Party, which focuses on pulling Britain out of the EU, or the French hunters’ rights party, which focuses on private property. There are also regionalist parties that, in an American context, would merely be considered quite conservative. Italy’s Northern League, for instance, takes a hard line on immigration but only as part of the larger accusation that the Italian welfare state loots middle-class taxpayers for the benefit of the politically favored. The favored include (but are by no means limited to) immigrants and asylum seekers.

The Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang (VB) behaves similarly. It certainly opposes immigration, but such opposition is subordinated to the more pressing interest of carving an independent Flanders out of a Belgium that they perceive to be exploiting it. It is worth noting that the VB’s political lineage can be traced back to World War II–era Belgian fascism. But many of Europe’s historically fascist parties are now very much in the European mainstream on immigration matters. Italy’s National Alliance (AN), descended from a party founded by Benito Mussolini, is the best example. The party leader, Gianfranco Fini, is one of Italy’s more pro-immigrant politicians (he has urged giving immigrants voting rights in local elections as soon as they arrive), and perhaps its most ardent defender of Israel. It was the Spanish Popular Party, which became the democratic home of conservative politicians after the death of Franco, that opened Spain up to mass immigration in the first place.

There have been episodes of serious anti-immigrant violence in Europe. “White riots” sometimes broke out in London between the 1950s and 1970s. Muslim graves were desecrated in Britain in 2005 by a group calling itself “The Black Nation.” Areas in eastern Berlin, notably the Soviet-era housing developments of Hellersdorf and Marzahn, are considered no-go areas by many nonwhite Germans. Several Turks died when radicals burned their apartments in the cities of Solingen and Hoyerswerda in 1993. That is not to mention the hooliganism of football supporters and others, which often has a significant overlap with racism and fascism. In France, one Paris–St. Germain fan was convicted of setting the mosque of Annecy and a local Muslim prayer room on fire in 2004, in the company of a collector of Hitler paraphernalia. It is probable that we underestimate the gravity of anti-immigrant violence, since much of it is camouflaged as street violence. But the impact of anti-immigrant radicalism on day-to-day European politics can be exaggerated.

Although we should not be surprised if politics gets more radical in coming years, which look to be years of economic privation, it is unlikely that World War II–style fascistic movements are Europe’s biggest worry. It is even less clear that the rightist parties that exist today are especially preoccupied with Islam. In France, the National Front (FN) founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, made up largely of ex-Communists and whites stranded in heavily immigrant housing projects, is known for its anti-immigrant, anti-multiculturalist rhetoric. But its stance is more ambivalent than it looks. Le Pen has at times taken pains to court the votes of Muslims and other immigrants, mostly by trying to convince them that he shares Arab foreign policy views on Israel and (more recently) Iraq. Le Pen was Europe’s most ardent defender of Saddam Hussein throughout the period between the two Iraq wars, both of which he strongly criticized. In the 2007 presidential election campaign, Le Pen, through his wife Jany worked with the Franco-African comedian Dieudonné to promote the rights of pygmies in Cameroon.

The Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), which entered the Austrian government in 2000, did something similar. The main foreign policy interest of its late leader, Jörg Haider, during his time in the international spotlight, was to strengthen ties with the dictator Moammar Gaddafi in Libya, in return for which Gaddafi hectored Europe to get over its guilt about its Nazi past and to keep “its eyes on the interests of its people and not those of the Zionist system.”

The European political landscape does include extremist parties that sow hatred and focus almost exclusively on immigrants, the most important of which is probably the British National Party. But it is a fringe party. The BNP controls a handful of local offices in northern England and southern neighborhoods such as Bermondsey, a Labour stronghold in southeast London where the number of foreign born rose 155 percent in a single decade.

But even on the extremes, the link with opposition to immigration need not be crystal clear. The German National Party (NPD), which has overt neo-Nazi traits, is made up of intellectuals of the extreme right and habitués of the skinhead and Rammstein hard-rock movements of the 1990s. The NPD took a dozen seats in the parliament of (formerly East German) Saxony in 2004 on a program that mixes neo-Nazism and neo-Communism. (The NPD has sometimes campaigned in alliance with the similarly disposed German People’s Union [DVU]; the name it took sometimes depended on the state in which it ran.) Bavarian-born Karl Richter, the most eloquent of the NPD’s members in the Saxon parliament, has expressed admiration for ex-Social Democrat Oskar Lafontaine, now a leader of the Left Party, which draws on the heritage and membership of the former East German state Communist party, the SED. The party communicates with its followers via rock music CDs featuring groups with names like “The Power of Capital.” Sixteen percent of kids under eighteen said they would vote NPD if they could.

The NPD’s importance is easily exaggerated. Saxony, the most geriatric of the German states, is projected to lose a sixth of its population by 2020. So a youth movement can grow in electoral weight even if it does not add members. Nor does it need a forward-looking agenda. The NPD, at least in Saxony, has stoked outrage for some of its members’ “revisionist” views on World War II and the Holocaust. Richter called Cold War East Germany the more German of the two states, “a small-scale, less efficient copy of the Third Reich that awakens a certain nostalgia even in the West [of Germany].” But curiously, the NPD’s rhetoric about immigration and Islam shows less animosity than one would expect. On the contrary, Richter expresses far more concern over what he calls American imperialism than over Muslim extremism. Of his party’s foreign policy vision, Richter stressed two pillars—to pursue a rapprochement with Russia and to restore the relations with the Muslim world that were “problem-free for centuries” until the postwar German alliance with the United States.

The Danish People’s Party

The single most immigrant-obsessed party in Europe is rigorously law abiding and democratic. The Danish People’s Party (DF) grew out of an anti-immigrant movement in Denmark that was started in 1986 by the Lutheran pastor, intellectual, and author Søren Krarup and by his cousin and fellow pastor Jesper Langballe. The two had come to despair over a 1983 refugee law that granted every asylum seeker the right to enter Denmark to have his case decided. “Such a rule is national suicide,” Langballe recalled two decades later. “You cannot give the whole world such rights and guarantees without taking away Danish people’s rights.” Many Danes agreed, and some were even willing to say so. In 1996, the party itself, newly founded by the housewife Pia Kjaersgaard, entered Parliament. It took 13 percent of the vote in the 2001 elections and brought twenty-two members to Copenhagen, including Krarup and Langballe. While it did not enter the government, the ruling Venstre party was dependent on its support for the next half-decade, and passed some of the most stringent restrictions on immigration and naturalization in Europe.

The DF combines a populist suspicion of high immigration with a determination to defend the Christian character of Danish life. It has little appeal among elites, who are quick to remark that it is “led by a housewife [Kjaersgaard] with only a ninth-grade education.” Kjaersgaard has said that Islam is not a religion. Some DF parliamentarians have made remarks more objectionable still. One parliamentarian, Louise Frevert, suggested sending immigrant criminals to Russian prisons, “since our laws do not allow us to kill them.” But the party is open and inclusive—Frevert, for instance, is a married lesbian and a former porn actress who once belly-danced for the Shah of Iran. And it is explicitly anti-authoritarian—many of its older members were ardent anti-Communists, according to Langballe. Tøger Seidenfaden, the editor of the daily Politiken and one of the DF’s most prominent foes, says of the party, “There is nothing fascist at all about it, nothing anti-democratic or violent. They regularly eject extremists. They are not like the National Front. That said, they are xenophobic, intolerant and anti-Muslim.”

The DF and movements like it owe their success not to any recrudescent European barbarism but to the silence of mainstream parties on issues that motivate voting publics. The big “people’s parties” have been withering measurably in all countries for a couple of decades. Immigration is not the only issue on which the major parties have failed to find a voice, but it is the biggest. In the first round of the French presidential elections in 2002, Jacques Chirac managed to finish first with the support of just a fifth of the public. The rival socialists finished so poorly that they were passed for second place by the National Front. This does not mean, however, that people want the establishment parties to fail. When it became apparent that Chirac’s challenger in the 2002 runoff would be Le Pen, 80 percent of France rallied behind Chirac.

The 2005 elections in Germany marked the first time since the Second World War that both major parties got under 40 percent, and the winning Christian Democrats were barely able to scrape their way to 35. The result of that election was a grand coalition, uniting the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats—a government that circled the wagons of the whole political establishment. It was the sealing of a similar establishment bargain in Holland—uniting the “red” laborites of the PvdA and the “blue” liberals of the VVD into a so-called “purple” coalition—that radicalized Pim Fortuyn.

Establishment parties had no incentive to respond to disquiet over immigration until the DF and the Pim Fortuyn List began to use it to draw votes. It is difficult to come up with a coherent policy for managing population flows in a complex global economy, and the cultural consequences that result from them. But it is easy to snigger at Pim Fortuyn and Søren Krarup and to say or imply that they are the second coming of Adolf Hitler. By the turn of the century, European politics was in a stalemate. In the name of “protecting democracy,” Europe’s political system was growing steadily less democratically accountable. Protecting democracy meant silencing people who raised questions for which leaders had no answers. The stalemate was broken by Nicolas Sarkozy who became president of France in May 2007.

Nicolas Sarkozy and the strength of the republic

During the riots in the heavily immigrant Paris suburb of Villiers-le-Bel in November 2007, six policemen were shot while using nonlethal crowd-control techniques to contain raging mobs of youths. “Some of them wore hoods, and didn’t limit themselves to throwing projectiles and Molotov cocktails,” one policeman said after the riots. “They used guns. And our response will not be limited indefinitely to firing flash-balls and tear gas.” One French judge expressed sympathy for the difficult living conditions endured by the rioters in Villiers-le-Bel, but insisted that there comes a time when assigning responsibility for violence is beside the point. “While it is clear,” he wrote, “that the excesses of one part of the population should be understood as the direct result of social conditions, which are a shame to our society, that doesn’t mean society has no right to defend itself.”

Earlier that year, Xavier Lemoine, the mayor of one of the most violent of the Paris suburbs, Montfermeil, said of urban unrest: “France can tolerate neither the illness nor the cure.” This “cure,” one infers, meant getting tough with Europe’s minorities, regardless of the constitutional and democratic niceties. And that was a grim diagnosis. The most important problem in Europe is the fallout from decades of mass immigration. The most important moral “value” in Europe is democracy. There is sometimes a striking lack of confidence in the latter’s capacity to address the former.

Sarkozy is probably the representative figure of the politics that is replacing uncritical multiculturalism. He is a pure product of the French political establishment, of the various Gaullist parties of the 1980s and 1990s. But he is not from the elite branch of it, that part schooled at the country’s specialized universities (especially the École Nationale d’Administration), and his rise was greeted with some of the same feigned horror with which the Dutch greeted Fortuyn.

In an important sense, Sarkozy was Fortuyn’s opposite. Fortuyn’s politics arose from the conviction that Western tolerance made the countries that practiced it weak. A country like the Netherlands was defendable only if it limited both immigration and the demands of multinational bodies. Sarkozy, by contrast, believed that “the republic and democracy are much stronger than we realize.” They could handle immigration, even mass immigration of the sort that France had received over the decades. He urged patience with suburban troublemakers and the havoc they wrought. “They’re young, they’re new,” he said in 2004. “That will fade. Give them time.”

But if integration was inevitable, it was also nonnegotiable. France could handle immigration because the French Republic was capable of being tough, and even ruthless. When the first riots of his presidency broke out in Villiers-le-Bel, Sarkozy told a roomful of police, “The response to riots is not spending more money and putting it on the back of the taxpayer. The response to riots is to arrest rioters.” When asked why he had delayed an urban revitalization plan, he replied, “It’s not up to delinquents shooting at the police to set the agenda of the Republic.”

Toughness is the most memorable part of Sarkozy’s agenda, because toughness is the most memorable thing about his character. As mayor of the city of Neuilly-sur-Seine in the 1980s, he walked into a building to negotiate personally with a man holding hostages at gunpoint. In 1999, taunted during a visit to a housing project outside of Paris by a hoodlum shouting “Sarko, go home!” he approached the young man and said, “Mister Sarkozy, if you don’t mind.” He later explained, “When they see you’re not afraid, they respect you more.”

Sarkozy was almost unique among French politicians in knowing what the inside of a housing project looked like. On the eve of the French banlieue riots of 2005, when the eleven-year-old son of an immigrant family was shot dead while washing his father’s car as a Father’s Day present in the Cité des Quatre Mille housing project outside of Paris, Sarkozy visited the family and promised to clean up the neighborhood à karcher—citing the trade name of a company that makes high-pressure hoses. We have already noted his promise to the residents of Aulnay-sous-Bois to take care of the “riff-raff” (racaille) who were terrorizing them.

Sarkozy thrived on the urban conflict that overwhelmed France in 2005. He was widely attacked for his karcher and racaille remarks, but he was the only major national politician whose popularity rose during the riots, not least among the voters who supported Jean-Marie Le Pen and the National Front. Polls during the 2007 election campaign that brought him the presidency even showed him doing better among Le Pen supporters than Le Pen himself. His best-known policy initiatives included trying sixteen-year-olds as adults, establishing a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, and testing immigrants’ DNA to prevent grants of citizenship and residence based on fraudulent claims of family relation. It was one of his proudest boasts as interior minister that the granting of first-time residency permits had fallen by 2.6 percent on his watch. Sarkozy was contemptuous of suggestions that he was pandering to fascists. “I always try to get as many votes as possible,” he said in an interview at the Ministry of the Interior in the winter of 2006, “whether it’s from the FN or anywhere else.”

There was something in Sarkozy’s program strongly reminiscent of Richard Nixon—not ethically, but in terms of both policy and political strategy. In 1968, after three years of race riots, Nixon won the U.S. presidency by nationalizing a crime issue that had until then overwhelmed local police chiefs and frightened national politicians into hand-wringing inaction. That part of Nixon’s policy was overwhelmingly popular and has never been seriously challenged in the decades since. Sarkozy’s imitation of Nixon may even have been a conscious one. Just as Nixon, in a Vietnam speech in November 1969, asked for the support of “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans,” Sarkozy in his 2007 campaign invoked “la France silencieuse, immensément majoritaire.”

But there was another Nixonesque trait that is less appreciated. For all his get-tough talk, Sarkozy had absolutely no quarrel with the fundamental settlement the previous generation’s political establishment had reached before he arrived on the scene. Just as Nixon was content to leave in place the welfare state built by Roosevelt and Johnson—and indeed, went to great lengths to protect and expand it—Sarkozy was not inclined to turn back the clock to a status quo before immigration. He did not think that France would be a better country without Muslims in it. “I think of myself,” Sarkozy wrote in 2004, “as a demanding friend of the Muslims of France.” Sarkozy’s credibility with the French public may have rested on his promises of fewer immigrants and harsher punishment for those who broke the law. At the same time, Sarkozy warned the same public that their problems with immigration and the new, multiethnic society would abate only if they accepted that the newcomers who had come were in France to stay.

Like Fortuyn, Sarkozy meant to shore up, rather than overthrow, the attainments of postwar tolerance. To this end, he left no cliché unspoken. “To accept and to value a nation’s diversity is to strengthen the nation,” he wrote. But Sarkozy’s tolerance was more a matter of principle than Fortuyn’s. Fortuyn believed in protecting the beneficiaries of diversity—as they had been designated by the social movements of the 1960s and the decades of political consolidation that followed. Eliminating anti-Semitism, racism, and sexual moralism were an outright improvement in Dutch life, he thought. But no neutral principles flowed from these achievements and no analogies should be drawn from them. Newcomers were not automatically entitled to similar rights. Fortuyn’s politics was a kind of tribalism, expressed in the language of diversity.

Sarkozy simply did not look at politics that way. For one thing, he did not fear religion (and particularly religious morals) the way Fortuyn did. Although Sarkozy was a firm defender of banning the headscarf in public school buildings, he did so not on the basis of progressive folklore about how the headscarf automatically means the subjection of women, but on the grounds of mutual respect. “When I enter a mosque, I take off my shoes,” he said, “When you enter a school, take off your veil.”

Of course, analogizing this way between a religious precept and a municipal building regulation is not exactly logical. The Sarkozy approach to a multiethnic society carried risks of its own. It required more of natives than they had so far proven inclined to give. It meant they had to mix with strangers to precisely the extent they were disinclined to. The biggest risk was that Fortuyn’s assessment of the relative strength of the West might be right.

Affirmative action

Ultimately, Sarkozy’s strategy rested on what he called “the remarkable experiment undertaken at Sciences-po.” He meant affirmative action. In 2001, the Institut des études politiques, known as Sciences-po and frequently criticized as a stronghold of French elitism, launched a program that would allow students from “priority education zones” (Zeps) to bypass its notoriously grueling written examination and submit to an oral interview instead. These Zeps were not randomly chosen. They were all poor areas with heavily immigrant populations. Richard Descoings, director of Sciences-po, told a reporter, “We are not recruiting them because they are poor, Arab or black but because they are good.” This was one of those white lies that are the mainstays of all affirmative action programs. Racial diversity was clearly the overarching goal. The program’s defenders have in unguarded moments described it as a means of “integrating” Sciences-po.

A group of students brought suit against Sciences-po on the grounds that its unequal treatment of applicants violated the laws of French citizenship, which mandate equality of treatment. In 2003, an appeals court disagreed. While it faulted Sciences-po for extending the privilege in an arbitrary way (to some Zeps and not others), it held that variable criteria for entry were an acceptable means of reaching egalitarian goals. So France now has affirmative action, and the road is clear for similar programs to be launched in other sectors of public life.

Clamoring for diversity has become a private sector obsession, too, ranging from Arab and immigrant groups’ successful agitation to get more nonwhite faces on French TV broadcasts to attempts in the editorial offices of Le Monde to get more Arab bylines. Official sources proclaim loudly that “diversity is an asset.” Many in France saw the need for American-style diversity programs as too obvious to require justification. Rioting strengthened their hand. In the United States, at such times of racial unrest as the Rodney King riots of 1992 and the O. J. Simpson trial of 1995, authorities can consult and deploy influential black people as interlocutors. Affirmative action has played a key role in buying such people into the system—not just politicians but also high-ranking bureaucrats and corporate executives. When French-Arab violence against Jews turned into a national crisis in 2002, or when the suburbs erupted across the country in 2005, France could not ask its powerful Arab citizens to appeal for calm, because it did not have any.

Such interlocutors come at a high price, though. Affirmative action exacts a huge toll on the state’s reputation for neutrality (because it must favor some groups over others) and probity (because if affirmative action is to do its work effectively, it cannot be admitted that its beneficiaries owe their positions to it). In Britain, the Policy Research Institute on Ageing and Ethnicity finds a third of businessmen say diversity contributes to performance—but many more disagree. We have already seen that the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has linked diversity to a decline of the trust-engendering social networks that he calls “social capital.” A political leader who seeks diversity has to weigh whether pursuing it is worth the cost.

Sarkozy, as president, became his country’s top defender of diversity. He appointed more Arabs and Berbers to high positions—including the justice minister Rachida Dati and the secretary for urban affairs Fadela Amara—than any of his predecessors. In his annual New Year’s wishes in 2008, he demanded diversity at every level of society and even urged placing the word diversity in the preamble to the French constitution. And he has called insistently for more affirmative action programs. Sarkozy believes that the need for such programs will only be temporary. “Positive discrimination implies a limitation in time,” he said in 2006. “Once the injustice is taken care of, there’s no need to envision any specific discrimination.” Asked whether it would take twenty years or more to take care of the specific injustice, he replied: “No, twenty years is too long.”

This view is naive. It is heedless of the American experience. Affirmative action programs, though consistently unpopular, tend to be permanent. They do not fade away as the problems they solve fade away—because the constituency favored by such programs protects its privileges with its heightened power. Affirmative action programs have been overturned in several state referenda, only to be reimposed through court decisions and executive orders.

Nor do such programs evolve as the demographic balance of power evolves. California still has programs designed to foster the hiring of nonwhites even now that nonwhites are a majority in the state. One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong. This logic is not lost on white people in the United States, and it will likely not be lost on European natives.

If some people are to be favored over others for diversity purposes, what is the criterion on which they are to be favored? American affirmative action programs, at least at the outset, had the advantage of conceptual clarity—they were to be based on race, in order to remedy a history of manifest de jure racial discrimination by whites against blacks. The European problem with minorities has no such clarity. It is not a legacy of slavery or Jim Crow, no equivalent of which existed in modern Europe. It is clearly not a legacy of colonialism, either—countries without an important colonial history, such as Sweden and Italy, have exactly the same problems with immigration and Islam that former colonial powers such as France and the Netherlands have.

But Europeans are attempting to solve their problem, whatever it is, as if it were a race problem, so it is taking on some of the dimensions of one. As affirmative action programs continue to spread, the racial logic behind them is expressed even more baldly than in the United States. The UK Home Office makes “race quality impact assessments” and sets ambitious “race employment targets” for new hires in police and immigration, as well as prison guards and employees, at its offices in London and Croydon (where this race-targeting program has lately accounted for 38 percent of new hires). Racism has not necessarily returned in Europe, but race, as a category of experience, has returned with a vengeance. The French writer Jean Birnbaum notes that intellectuals on the left have come to explain riots in the banlieues through the lens of race. “The revolt in the suburbs,” writes Etienne Balibar, “testifies to the depths of a carefully repressed racial conflict at the heart of French society.” Robert Castel called the same riots “a powerful revelation of the way the ethnic question is posed throughout French society.”

Racism is a terrible problem, but at least it is a conceptually simple problem. Affirmative action was launched in the United States, whether wisely or unwisely, under the assumption that blacks want exactly the same things as whites, and that only racism stood in the way of their attaining them. The problem Europeans have is much more complicated. It is deeply held beliefs, not skin color, that present the main challenge. Europe’s predicament involves population decline, aging, immigration, and the steady implantation of a foreign religion and culture in city after city. Europeans are not at all sure their minorities want the same things that they themselves do.