The base line in Europe for what politicians say and do about immigration and the role of Islamic communities in their countries is moving.
It is shifting in a way that mainstream politics now permits its leaders to say flatly that immigrants, Muslims in large part, must accommodate the rules and traditions of the societies they enter, rather than vice versa.
In recent weeks, there have been paroxysms of controversy in Germany over a critical book on the place of immigrants there, which found substantial public support. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy has been accused of targeting immigrants for quick political gain. In both cases, a new discussion space has opened where the compatibility — or ability to integrate — of large Muslim and other populations with national laws and culture is coming under challenge.
It is a European event, in France’s case overlapping the country’s treatment of foreign Roma, or Gypsies, who have overstayed the three-month welcome automatically accorded citizens of Bulgaria and Romania as members of the European Union.
Good, you could say, in the sense that the issue confronts an often muzzled truth about European life and a matter of genuine public concern. Unsettling, you could insist, because it has erupted at a time of limited European economic perspectives, national leaders with weak public support, and, mostly from the left, reflex rebuttals using words like Nazism or racism to condemn what is, in many respects, a new frankness.
As a measure of the change in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has now expressed concern about supposed violent tendencies of fundamentalist Muslim youth (“We can talk about it without suspicion of being anti-foreigner”). And she has said that “severity” is an important factor in dealing with those immigrants who resist integration — an attitude she described as far away from the previous emphasis on multiculturalism.
The German case illustrating the changing European base line on national identity comes alongside the attempts of traditional Dutch middle-ground parties to form a minority government dependent on support from the anti-immigrant Freedom Party, or the like-minded Sweden Democrats’ first-time election into the Swedish Parliament this past weekend.
In a sense, Ms. Merkel found herself with a rare political windfall. A book, “Germany Does Away With Itself” by Thilo Sarrazin, a member of the executive board of Bundesbank and a Social Democrat, arguing that Germany was imploding as a result of millions of immigrants from Islamic countries, provided her with a wedge to attack the argument. It also allowed the chancellor to reposition herself as a watchful protector of German values, mindful of immigrants who would create no-go enclaves in German cities, disrespect women or fail to heed what she has called the “obligations” of living in Germany.
Concerning Muslims, Mr. Sarrazin’s negative thesis was essentially a biological and genetic one — unforgivable in any context, all the more so in a German one — to which he added a remark about Jews’ supposed “particular gene.” He later apologized and resigned from the central bank, while an Emnid poll showed 18 percent of Germans would vote for “a Sarrazin party.” Other polls reported that only 16 percent believed Muslim culture fits in a German context, and that 46 percent considered themselves these days as strangers in their own country.
Who could fault Ms. Merkel’s response to Mr. Sarrazin? Or criticize her making an award in defense of freedom of speech to the Danish journalist who escaped a terrorist attack on his life for his cartoons of Muhammad?
But, in parallel fashion, the chancellor was also shifting the framework of the German discussion concerning immigration against the background of her diminished poll scores and growing disfavor among right-wingers in her Christian Democratic party.
According to the chancellor, her Social Democrat and Greens party predecessors — as if she hadn’t been in office for five years — “insufficiently placed the newcomers face to face with their obligations.” If German cityscapes may have more mosques, she said, “there can’t be a neighborhood or place in Germany which the police don’t have the right to enter.”
If those were Ms. Merkel’s views all along, she waited a long time to express them distinctly.
Mr. Sarkozy, less subtly, looks like he had a similar motive — winning back voters on the right — in advocating measures that could strip naturalized citizens of their acquired French nationality for crimes including shooting at cops, polygamy and female circumcision, and in specifically backing the expulsion of non-French Roma from illegal camps in France.
Polls in Le Figaro, a newspaper that backs the president, showed his decisions to have majority support, although similar polls in other publications offered less conclusive scores. Le Monde, which doesn’t much like Mr. Sarkozy and questioned the legality of his action, insisted all the same that the integration of foreign Roma in France was improbable and that ignoring this reality would be “radical chic in its most unbearably flimsy” form.
The European Commission, the European Union’s executive body, went after France, threatening administrative censure on the basis that the Roma, as European citizens, had been victims of specific discrimination.
But it lost credibility when its commissioner for justice, Viviane Reding, wrenching history, spoke of France’s expulsions in the context of Nazi bestiality. It was the same commission that did not discipline its trade commissioner, Karel de Gucht, for asserting earlier in the month that “it is not easy to have a rational discussion with a moderate Jew” about the Middle East.
The European Union, in fact, has relatively little to offer when it comes to clarity on immigration issues, having no common quotas, a minimum of specific regulations, and rules that encourage free movement across borders. The Union appears not to have advanced on the question since late 2004, when the filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam by a Muslim extremist; the Dutch government, chairing an E.U. summit meeting in Brussels, considered it inopportune to bring the issue of Muslim integration before its partners.
No matter how it got there, Europe now has tougher reference points for discussion of an immigration and identity problem that touches its citizens profoundly. But the issue risks being driven more by opportunistic and changeable politics than anything like a common — and determined — vision.
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The International Herald Tribune