Chapter 12

Survival and Culture

Europe’s duty to the world—European emancipation from America—The American model of a multiethnic society, and the Ottoman model—From “Islam is peace” to “Love it or leave it”—Two types of utility

For the first time in centuries, Europeans are living in a world they did not, for the most part, shape. Mass immigration is part of a cluster of social trends—including freer economies, more wealth, more women in work, more income inequality, lower birthrates—that all Western countries have experienced in the last generation or two. Since there are no exceptions to these trends, it would seem Nicolas Sarkozy is wrong to distinguish between immigration that is chosen and immigration that is undergone. If immigration were really a “choice,” some countries would have chosen against it. And yet, over the last half a century, not a single free Western country did.

Why didn’t they? This is a mystery at first. Western countries are supposed to be democracies, accountable to voter assessments and preferences, and all Western publics believe they have too much immigration. Immigration, with all the cultural consequence it brings, is an example of what the political philosopher David Singh Grewal calls “network power”—individual choices, cumulatively, can add up to societal “choices” that nobody consciously made, and outcomes that nobody wanted. Certain influential Europeans believed after World War II that it should be possible to bring immigrants from the Third World to the First. But once immigration was possible in some circumstances, it became irresistible in most circumstances. In Mexico, 40 percent of people say they would move to the United States if they could. In Turkey, Gallup polls have found that the top reason Turks favored their country’s bid for EU membership is the ability to move to any country in Europe and work there.

The story of globalization is the story of the unintended collective consequences of individual choices freely made. There are many such consequences, but immigration is the one that poses the biggest challenge to democracies (and perhaps to democracy). It means importing not just factors of production but factors of social change. For decades, Europeans have been frustrated by the inability of their leaders either to regulate immigration or to take full economic advantage of it.

More often than not, globalization and republican self-rule, of the sort that Europe has enjoyed since the seventeenth century, are at odds. If you want to open your country up to the former, you must sacrifice elements of the latter. Europeans fear their individual countries are slowly escaping their political control, and they are right, although they can seldom spell out precisely how. They sense that Europe is being taken over culturally—whether by theocratic Islam or by a (market) liberalism that accords no particular value to Europe’s most cherished traditions. The market’s momentum appears to have been stalled by the financial crisis that began in 2008, but it is not likely to remain stalled forever. Both forces, whether or not they are actively hostile, are spreading through acts and concessions, each of which is too small to protest, but all of which, taken cumulatively, spell a permanent and undesirable cultural alteration of their continent.

Europe’s duty to the world

If Europe is getting more immigrants than its voters want, this is a good indication that its democracy is malfunctioning. European leaders have chosen to believe something different—that its immigration and asylum policies involve the sort of nonnegotiable moral duties that you don’t vote on. As one European cabinet minister put it in the summer of 2006, “We live in a borderless world in which our new mission is defending the border not of our countries but civility and human rights.” If one is not careful with this kind of language, it can be taken to mean that Europe has no right to set any immigration policies at all.

Europeans are confused about whether they are citizens of the world or citizens of their own nations. In 2005, Spain and Morocco issued a joint call for a conference to discuss European and African differences over immigration. Morocco was a good negotiating partner for the EU, according to a news report in the Financial Times, because “Brussels considers Morocco one of the success stories of its 10 year programme to deepen ties with countries on the southern shore of the Mediterranean.” Now, it is true that the EU proclaims Morocco a success story. But it is quite odd, as well, because just three years earlier, Morocco’s armed forces had attacked EU territory, landing a force and raising their flag on the Spanish island of Perejil, hard by the African mainland—provoking Spain’s largest military operation since 1939 and a diplomatic crisis that was defused only with strenuous behind-the-scenes negotiations led by the U.S. Department of State.

Power relations between Europe and the poor countries are more complicated than they look. The poor countries are not without trumps when it comes to immigration. The greatest of these is informational asymmetry. They know more about Europe than Europeans know about them, and they gain more from mutual contact. That is how it worked during the Roman Empire—where barbarians acquired (desirable) military tactics from the sophisticated Roman legions, and the legions brought the (undesirable) habits of frontier warfare back to Rome.

And that is how it works today. People can be swapped in and out of the Western economy, because Western society is a logical system that is fairly comprehensible to anyone who takes the time to study it. Consider the African immigrants arriving by flotilla in Spain, described in chapter 3. Television news has given them, even if they are scarcely literate, a knowledge of Spanish immigration law to rival that of most immigration bureaucrats. They understand that, until a newcomer confesses his national origin, the authorities cannot deport him, and that if his national origin is not discovered within forty days, he must be released into the general public. They know that Spain has better extradition relations with certain countries than with others, and that it is therefore, as we noted earlier, better to claim to be from Ivory Coast than from Senegal.

Europeans, by contrast, have very little knowledge of the societies that send them immigrants. Any time there is a backlog of asylum applicants or boat people, immigrant source countries must be bribed to send “identification missions” to exert the kind of pressure that democratic authorities can exert only when they know where someone lives and who his family is. You can see what an enviable privilege it is not to have such things known about you. Compared with natives of Internet-age societies like those in Europe and the United States, who have been largely stripped of their anonymity, illegal immigrants positively luxuriate in it. They are princes of privacy.

Limiting immigration means accessing Third World expertise. This comes at a steep price—paid from rich countries to poor ones in the form of debt forgiveness, development aid, “co-development” (opening of Western businesses in which developing-country businessmen share an interest), and late-model four-wheel-drive vehicles for government officials. When the leaders of poor countries cooperate with the West in limiting immigration, it is generally described as a battle against “the mafia” or “human trafficking.” These are very strange words for describing, let us say, a fisherman who charges for passage on his own boat, and who has more in common with a taxi driver than a crime syndicate. The word mafia is a necessary fig leaf for negotiators from poor countries, who cannot be seen to cooperate in closing the door on one of their natives’ only exits from poverty. But it is a great comfort to European leaders, as well. It implies that if the continent can just manage to solve a crime problem, its immigration problem will disappear. Such talk disguises a problem of will as a problem of conscience. It implies that leaders are (selflessly) addressing a humanitarian crisis, not (selfishly) looking for ways to bar the door.

The asymmetry of knowledge between the West and the non-West may be the best weapon those at war with the West have. This is obviously the case where the war on terror pits Western arms against radical Islam. Compare the ease with which terrorists have operated in U.S. airports to the lack of ease with which NATO troops operate in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal areas. Muslims know a great deal about Western societies—starting with their languages—while Westerners know next to nothing about Muslim ones. Anything that evens the epistemological playing field can, in anti-Western eyes, seem a threat. Azar Nafisi’s bestseller Reading Lolita in Teheran, for instance, has been praised by readers all over the West for its ability to humanize a people who have been little known for the past quarter-century for providing social detail to a country that is looked on merely as a Western enemy. But that is exactly what Hamid Dabashi, a literary scholar at Columbia, doesn’t like about it. In a revealing outburst of intolerance, he writes that Nafisi’s book

is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India, when, for example, in 1835 a colonial officer like Thomas Macaulay decreed: “We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect.” Azar Nafisi is the personification of that native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the very same project.

European emancipation from America

World War II, and the looming threat that something like it would be provoked by the Soviet Union, scared Europe into willing participation in an Atlantic alliance. The U.S. role as occupier of the formerly fascist lands and defender of all the territory west of the Iron Curtain took a lot of the decisions about the direction of European societies out of European hands. It was the common experience of American occupation, American liberalism, and American legalism that homogenized Europeans to the point where they could contemplate European unity. The EU, although neither Americans nor Europeans are fond of admitting it, is the institutional expression of the Americanization of Europe.

Once the dangers of the Cold War had passed, Europeans sought emancipation from American tutelage. When Germany was reunified, 58 percent of its citizens wanted to withdraw from both alliances, NATO as well as the Warsaw Pact. Throughout the Clinton years, some European leaders sought pretexts—capital punishment, America’s unwillingness to ratify the Kyoto global-warming accords, its opposition to an international criminal court—to make a show of their independence from the wishes of the United States. Europe was of two minds about America—other European leaders fought just as hard to preserve the continent’s Atlanticist orientation. Of course, the link to the United States could not be broken as long as Europeans lacked the will for, or failed to see the logic in, paying for their own military defense. But the impatience with American tutelage is a constant. No doubt the Obama years, seen as a chance for a new beginning in Euro-American relations, will provide ample material for trans-Atlantic disagreements.

European impatience with American influence was powerful, and it was further strengthened by the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. The opposition of France and Germany—and, later, Spain—to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an expression of Europe’s preexisting wish for emancipation from American tutelage. The Iraq invasion was not the cause of that wish. Europeans commonly claim that their publics were in full solidarity with the United States after the attacks of 2001, and that it was only when legitimate self-defense drifted into George W Bush’s blundering military misadventure in Iraq that Europe had no choice but to resist. But this is not true. While the Bush administration expected that Europeans would have as much interest as Americans in shoring up a world system that had come under attack, Europeans were in a state of mind where their self-esteem meant more to them than their self-interest.

In many quarters, the attacks on the World Trade Center were met with indifference. In his diary of September 11, 2001, the former Labour MP Tony Benn recorded attending a monthly meeting of a group called Labour Action for Peace, where he was stunned by the behavior of his colleagues. “Although they all knew what had happened,” he wrote, “they spent about an hour discussing who’d got the leaflets for the forthcoming conference, who was doing the collection, was the pamphlet ready, had the room been booked.” Throughout Europe in the days after September 11, there were expressions of preemptive condemnation for an unjustified American overreaction that had not happened yet but which was seen as inevitable. Thousands marched in Paris against the invasion of Afghanistan under banners reading “No to the imperialist crusade!” On September 13, the leftist columnist Seumas Milne had written a lament on the Guardians website that could be mistaken for a parody of anti-Americanism from a satirical paper, such as Private Eye or The Onion or Le Canard En-chaîné:

Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don’t get it.…Shock, rage and grief there [have] been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process—or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world—seems almost entirely absent.

A more important question for our purposes is why America was hated with such bitterness in the columns of the Guardian and in other opinion forums in Europe. One reason is certainly that the United States eroded Europe’s distinctive national traditions and replaced them with a homogenized, one-size-fits-all mass consumer culture. At least that is how it looked to Europeans. Europe had reached the point where it could not even generate its own fads. The United States had an ethnic women’s fiction craze (Laura Esquivel, Louise Erdrich) around 1990; Britain got its own (Zadie Smith, Monica Ali) in the late 1990s. The United States had a mammoth and illogical row over reparations for the slave trade in the early 1990s; France blew up over the very same arguments (including their anti-Semitic formulations) in 2005. Affirmative action, which, as we noted in the last chapter, was formulated for a specifically American problem in the 1970s, swept Europe three decades later. Europe mocked America’s anti-smoking laws for (a very few) years before adopting them wholesale. Even if this dependence was not the result of any cultural-imperialist design on America’s part, it was humiliating to Europeans.

America is ever present in the cultural laments of European intellectuals. It is seen as sapping the élan vital of these once-great civilizations. “A living heritage,” wrote Matthias Politycki,

is not least a storehouse of ways of thinking, building and behaving, a source of inspiration for all kinds of present-day duties. We in central Europe, however, are doing our utmost to surrender what is left of our millennial inheritance—the diversity of languages and the identities bound up with them—in favor of a rampant pseudo-Americanization.

In The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq described a surgeon who kicked himself for having blown an opportunity because “he had completely missed the emerging market for silicone breast implants. He saw it as a passing fad that wouldn’t sell outside America. That was clearly idiotic. There is no example of a fashion coming out of the United States that has failed to swamp Europe a few years later—none.”

The American model of a multiethnic society,
and the Ottoman model

Immigration is Americanization. They are two faces of the same disruptive system of economic relations that is supplanting traditional European ones. In an age of public atonement and rhetorical squeamishness, it has often not been possible to lament or condemn immigration, or the policies that summoned immigrants en masse. But it is possible to say that Europe’s decision to welcome millions of foreigners was made at a time when it was not of sound mind and body, in a political landscape drawn up by Hitler and Stalin, and as the ward of a country—the United States—whose interests coincide less with those of Europe now that the age of Hitler and Stalin has passed.

Enoch Powell (again), who was, not coincidentally, the most doggedly anti-American European politician of his time, warned in 1968, “With the lapse of a generation or so we shall at last have succeeded—to the benefit of nobody—in reproducing ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’ the haunting tragedy of the United States.” In the early 1990s, the Lombard League (later the Northern League) handed out leaflets in Italy reading, “If you like a multiracial society so much, you can move to New York.”

Europe is thus in a funny predicament. It is an increasingly anti-American continent facing dire problems to which the only proven solution is to become more like America. Because the United States shows, at least, that one can receive great masses of immigrants from all over the world and retain a culture that is still open, free, and Western. American society appears to many Europeans, whether they like the United States or not, as their continent’s consolation prize. It the kind of society Europe will have by default, if it musters the resolve (or makes the Faustian bargain) to keep its economy as free as the age’s straitened financial circumstances permit.

Of course, “America” as it exists in the European mind is, now as ever, two-thirds myth. Europeans believe America equals European culture plus entropy. Perhaps the most cherished European myth about the United States is that Americans make no particular claims for their culture (to the extent they even have one) and don’t particularly care whether newcomers hold on to theirs. This is quite wrong. America may be open in theory, but in practice it exerts Procrustean pressures on its immigrants to conform, and it is its pressures, not its openness, that have bound America’s diverse citizens together as one people. Yes, you can have a “hyphenated identity” if you insist on it—but you had better know which side of the hyphen your bread is buttered on.

What confuses outsiders is that these pressures to Americanize are never stated. They are embedded in the social and (especially) economic systems through which immigrants must move to survive. Immigrants to the United States, just like immigrants anyplace, seldom think of themselves as immigrants. They travel hoping to find scope for their ambitions that they cannot find in their own society. With the ease of modern travel, it is not unrealistic for an immigrant to aspire to reenter his society of birth at a higher socioeconomic level after a few years of work in a more advanced economy. But since, generally, the immigration years immediately precede the settling-down years, an immigrant can easily get trapped in a country he thinks he’s just passing through. He may acquire a monoglot spouse and children. If employed, he will almost certainly get addicted to his level of income. It is true that an immigrant can maintain his ancestral culture. But if it is a culture that prevents him from speaking English well or showing up to work promptly, he will go hungry. Then he will go home. No one will miss him.

The American success with immigration is the product not just of brutal indifference and of government policies that are distasteful to most Europeans, but also of historical conditions that are hard to replicate. First, America’s nineteenth-century immigrants had a mostly empty continent to settle. Its late-twentieth-century immigrants had the mostly empty peripheries of the labor-starved cities of the American Sun Belt.

Second, the most recent mass immigration to America interacted with, and drew strength from, one of the great societal revolutions in American history—the rolling back of racial segregation. Just because blacks were no longer forced into the most menial jobs did not mean those menial jobs no longer had to be done. It may also be that the arrival of nonwhite immigrants served the white majority in the United States by providing a standing refutation of charges of white racism.

Third, another social revolution—not unrelated to desegregation—further simplified the assimilation of immigrants. Beginning with the Nixon administration and picking up steam thanks to the “war on drugs” of the 1980s, the U.S. penal system was reformed into a merciless, draconian machine, with offenses so numerous and prison sentences so severe that, as of this writing, a quarter of the prison inmates in the world are held in the United States. Despite occasional sensationalist magazine features about Salvadoran and Jamaican gangs, American cities and suburbs are extremely inhospitable places for immigrants who are criminally inclined. There has never in recent decades been the sentiment, as there is in Europe, that newcomers account for the bulk of the crime problem.

And even with all these advantages, in which Europe is totally lacking, the American public still does not like immigration. A 2006 poll by the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans (53 percent) think all 11 million illegals should be “required to go home.”

In the present tormented context of the war on terror, it is hard to ignore one specific blessing America enjoys. It is that, despite having launched two wars in the Muslim world and stood steadfastly by the state of Israel in all its conflicts, the United States has had fewer rumblings of subversion from its first- and second-generation Muslims than Europe has. That has been the source of much self-congratulation among Americans, who rush to attribute the difference to a variety of real or imagined U.S. virtues, from lower taxes to less racism. Closer observers tend to see this self-congratulation as unfounded. “The real story of American Muslims is one of accelerating alienation from the mainstream of U.S. life,” the journalist Geneive Abdo has written, “with Muslims in this country choosing their Islamic identity over their American one.”

The United States has Muslims—but it has not yet had any mass immigration of Muslims. Scale matters. America has about 2 million Muslims (excluding black Muslims) scattered about the country. If its Muslim population were proportionate to that of France and similarly dispersed, it would have close to 40 million, concentrated in a handful of major cities and poised to take political control of them. All sorts of attitudes would change, including both Muslim deference to the wider society (which would wane) and the wider society’s concern about Islam (which would wax). The jury is still out on whether the U.S. melting pot will work on Muslims as it has worked on other immigrants.

In a globalized world, where ancestral identities are no longer extinguished by long lack of contact with the mother country, a second immigration model may be much more relevant to the European situation than the U.S. melting pot: That is the millet system of the late Ottoman Empire. Ottoman cities of the time, like Sarajevo, Thessalonica, and Istanbul, may have been the most cosmopolitan places in the world. They included large minority populations of Greek Christians, Armenian Christians, Jews, and others, who were organized into ethnic communities, or millets, that enjoyed a certain amount of self-rule. But at the start of the nineteenth century, Turkey’s European neighbors used the oppression of their “brethren” in Greece and other spots inside Ottoman borders as their pretext to tear the empire to pieces.

For decades the dominant strain of Turkish nationalist thinking has been that Ottoman tolerance was the most important weapon the empire’s enemies used against it, and even that the empire died of its tolerance. It is easy to deplore nationalist myths. But this background should be understood by anyone wishing to comprehend the massacres of millions of Armenians during the First World War, or the idolatry of Kemal Atatürk, or what made Turkish nationalism so virulent and uncompromising that the Kurdishness of Kurdish-speaking Kurds has been officially denied by the central government for much of the last century.

What the Turks did, in reaction to the carving up of their multinational empire, was to reconceive the rump of it as the birthright of one “people.” They drew the lesson that to have any officially recognized minorities at all can, under certain circumstances, be a dangerous thing. It is striking that the European champions of Turkish admission to the EU, who are tireless in adducing commonalities between Turkish and European history, have paid not the slightest attention to the history of Turkish minority policy, except to deplore the country’s modern-day persecution of the Kurds and pass retrospective condemnations of the slaughter of the Armenians.

The Danish cartoon crisis shows that Europeans and Ottomans have at least certain points in common. The worldwide violence and boycotts that followed on Jyllands-Posten’s publication of satirical cartoons about Muhammad did not require that the Danish Muslim community be badly integrated, or disgruntled—as indeed, they were not, particularly. All that was required was immigration, global media, radicalization of the Muslim world, extravagant claims for human rights, and a generalized fading of the sense that what goes on in someone else’s country is none of your business. Under the circumstances, one traveling delegation of a few angry Danish imams was sufficient to rally violent people around the globe in defense of their allegedly beleaguered “brethren.” Whether Europe’s minority policies cause wider unrest will not depend solely on whether minority grievances are manageable.

From “Islam is peace” to “Love it or leave it”

Mass immigration into Europe and the consolidation of Islam there are changing European life permanently. As the intellectual historian Mark Lilla put it in 2007,

It is an unfortunate situation, but we have made our bed, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Accommodation and mutual respect can help.…Western countries have adopted different strategies for coping, some forbidding religious symbols like the head scarf in schools, others permitting them. But we need to recognize that coping is the order of the day, not defending high principle, and that our expectations should remain low.

Lilla captures perfectly the ambiguity of a Europe rueful about the legacy of immigration and disinclined (or too weak) to make a fuss about it. But his hopes for a strategy based on coping are unrealistic, at least in a democracy. Proud peoples are not content to “cope.” And whether they are right or wrong, politicians who champion “low expectations”—from James Callaghan to Jimmy Carter—quickly wind up ex-politicians.

The deeper difficulty is that the “we” Lilla posits does not for the moment exist. Such a “we” existed twenty years ago when Europeans still lived under the minatory shadow of World War II, but it does not exist now. There is a generation of people born between 1930 and 1960 who drew not only economic benefit from immigration but moral prestige as well. Immigration allowed them to present themselves as people of high principle. That generation now shares power with a later one, which will pay for both the economic attainments and the moral pretensions of its predecessors. In this sense, Europeans have not grown “harder” or “less generous” toward immigrants. They are just in the bill-paying stage of a transaction that has already occasioned a good deal of buyer’s remorse.

It is a brave thing to be an immigrant, to cast off from your old reference points and certitudes and set out in quest of a better life. But many native Europeans in our time are in a similar position. They live an éxil à l’intérieur—cut off by economic and cultural changes from the world they thought they would inhabit. In one respect they are in a worse position than immigrants—they didn’t choose this disruption. And the economic downturn that began in 2008 has rendered European countries even less recognizable to their natives.

Contrary to widespread suspicions, the old, cushy social contract, the Europe of stable marriages, plentiful jobs, light policing, and frictionless social relations is not being sneakily withheld from Muslim and other newcomers by Europeans who have grown tired of offering it to them. Such a social contract is no longer available to Europeans themselves. For a good number of European natives, particularly working-class ones, expulsion from the culture of their parents is the story of their lives. That being the case, it no longer seems unreasonable to demand that immigrants who want to stay in Europe give up the ways of their own parents.

It is easier to make this demand in a globalized world. “I like the metaphor of a club,” the Francophone intellectual and former Israeli diplomat Élie Barnavi told a journalist in 2007:

If you want to belong, there are rules. If you don’t like them, you don’t have to join. If you want to play by different rules, find another club. That’s why, once again, the expression “France—love it or leave it” sounds fair to me. In a wide-open world, there’s no reason you can’t go elsewhere. Nobody is required to love his country or the values it proclaims. But if you choose a country, you have to accept it.

Barnavi was rejecting the idea that seeking a better life was reason enough to come and just obeying the law was reason enough to be allowed to stay. Others reject the idea that simply seeking a better life is reason enough to come in the first place. “Why should we welcome anyone who comes here only for the money?” asked the longtime newspaper editor Max Hastings. “If a newcomer is unwilling to defer to our values, flawed as these may seem, then surely no Western society has a moral obligation to admit him?”

Certain Europeans are resolved to defend their continent’s values, particularly against Islam. But what does that mean? You cannot defend what you cannot define. There is no consensus, not even the beginning of a consensus, about what European values are. A united Europe would have nothing to fear from Islam, but Europe is not united. Its civilization is split in two, torn between the ideal of human rights and the ideal of patriotism, between fear of Europe’s religious heritage and pride in it, between viewing Islam as a permanent new feature of Europe’s religious landscape and as something that will dissolve on contact with hedonism and consumerism. Being true to Europe can mean getting tough (since the costs of battling Islam frontally will only rise as Muslims become more numerous) and being nice (since Islam will be powerful enough in Europe someday soon that Europeans will not wish to have crossed it).

Britain is a country that has moved back and forth between “Islam is peace” and “Love it or leave it.” It passed a tough Terrorism Act of 2000, a year before the attacks on the World Trade Center. After the London transport bombings of 2005, prime minister Tony Blair warned that those who do not “share and support the values that sustain the British way of life,” or who incite hatred against Britain, “have no place here.” A few months later, he added that Islamist preachers who condone terrorism “should not be in this country.”

After the failed plot to blow up several airliners between Britain and the United States in the summer of 2006, this change become still more explicit. Global terrorism, Blair said, “means traditional civil-liberty arguments are not so much wrong, as just made for another age.” Like George W Bush, he made it easier to extradite terrorism suspects and to intercept suspicious communications. He extended the length of time that suspects could be held without trial. This was an astonishing reversal, for it was Blair who, shortly after his arrival in office in 1997, made British law subject to the European Convention on Human Rights, turning modern civil liberties into core British values. Suddenly he was arguing that they are no such thing—they are temporary adjustments that were useful under certain specific circumstances in part of Europe between World War II and the late twentieth century.

Tough approaches and nice ones are difficult to mix. Sometimes it is difficult even to determine what the tough and the nice options are. For instance, Souad Sbai, the longtime president of the Italian Moroccan women’s association (Acmid-Donna) and now a deputy in the party of Silvio Berlusconi, has spent many years trying to bring Italian-style women’s rights to Moroccan families. One of her main tasks has been agitating for custody on behalf of women whose husbands had kidnapped their children to North Africa. Typically, the cause of the kidnapping was that the mothers had shown some sort of untoward European comportment: resisting being locked in the house all day, resisting being joined by a second spouse in a polygamous relationship, or resisting wearing the veil. Just where a reasonable Westerner’s sympathies ought to lie in this question is not easy to say. A victory for women’s rights would most likely require reimporting the chauvinist father, who may be strong enough within the family to impose his Islamist worldview on all seven of his children. Asserting Italian law could mean working against Italian values.

The deportation of radical Islamist preachers, a centerpiece of both French and British domestic policy in the middle of this decade, provides another example. It is helpful only as a marginal component of immigration policy. It does nothing about the spread of Islamism among European citizens. Being tough on Muslim foreigners and nice to Muslim citizens will comfort Europeans only to the extent that they maintain the idea that immigration is something temporary and reversible.

Two types of utility

It no longer is. Europeans can only hope that newcomers, especially Muslim newcomers, will assimilate peaceably. Materially, immigrants ought to want to assimilate. In many cases, Europe’s elevation of immigrants has been magnificent. At a magazine shop in a shopping mall in Copenhagen, it is not a surprise to meet a sneaker salesman with a run-of-the-mill state education who speaks four languages—say, Danish, English, Turkish, and Kurmanji. This is an extraordinary attainment, whether you compare his education to that available in his parents’ Anatolian village or to the education a member of the European working class would have got a century ago. From this perspective, it is hard to describe Europe as a civilization in decline. Yet it is a civilization in decline. It is missing some hard-to-define factor. Whether or not it can defend itself, it has lost sight of why it should.

Impressive though our Copenhagen sneaker salesman may be as a symbol of Europe, it is far from certain that his allegiance is with Europe. As the German jurist Udo di Fabio has lamented:

The adherents of our well-intentioned politics of tolerance, which makes generous offers of integration in order to stave off the cultural fragmentation of society, are missing the basic problem: Why in God’s name should a member of a vital world culture want to integrate into Western culture, when Western culture, which at least in his view is not producing enough offspring and no longer has any transcendental idea, is approaching its historical end? Why should he get caught up in a culture marked as much by self-doubt as by arrogance, which has squandered its religious and moral inheritance on a forced march to modernity, and which offers no higher ideal of the good life beyond travel, longevity and consumerism?

The Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto distinguished between two kinds of collective self-interest pursued in any community: utility of a community (survival value) and utility for a community (well-being). The conflict between these two utilities is sometimes clear, as in the rearing of children or the preparation for military defense, both of which require self-abnegation on the part of adults, and divert resources away from present enjoyments. But such questions also come up when people are deciding whether to import immigrants to fix meals, make beds, and scrub floors for a pittance or to do the work themselves. As the American political intellectual James Burnham wrote in 1943:

In general, measures which provide more adequately for the strength of the community in the future, especially in a future some years or generations distant, diminish the satisfactions of the existing generation. Which, then, is better: a shorter historical life for the community, to end in its destruction, with more internal satisfactions as it goes along, or a longer life with fewer satisfactions? This seems to be frequently, perhaps always, the choice. The answer, needless to say, is never given by deliberate, logical decision.

For decades, European authorities pursued utility for themselves over utility of their society. Indeed, even to raise the question of whether immigration will promote or endanger European survival is considered vulgar and un-European at best, extremist at worst. Immigrant communities have felt under no such constraint.

Europe’s basic problem with Islam, and with immigration more generally, is that the strongest communities in Europe are, culturally speaking, not European communities at all. This problem exists in all European countries, despite a broad variety of measures taken to solve it—multiculturalism in Holland, laïcité in France, benign neglect in Britain, constitutional punctiliousness in Germany. Clearly Europe’s problem is with Islam and with immigration, and not with specific misapplications of specific means set up to manage them. Islam is a magnificent religion that has also been, at times over the centuries, a glorious and generous culture. But, all cant to the contrary, it is in no sense Europe’s religion and it is in no sense Europe’s culture.

It is certain that Europe will emerge changed from its confrontation with Islam. It is far less certain that Islam will prove assimilable. Europe finds itself in a contest with Islam for the allegiance of its newcomers. For now, Islam is the stronger party in that contest, in an obvious demographic way and in a less obvious philosophical way. In such circumstances, words like “majority” and “minority” mean little. When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.