Starting Points: Europe

Showing posts with label Europe. Show all posts

Mar 30, 2010

JRS Europe reports on forced migration - Jesuit Refugee Service/USA

Image by Hovic via Flickr

JRS Europe reports on forced migration - Jesuit Refugee Service/USA

Feb 23, 2010

Europe's Stark Choice on Immigration

Europe is on track to lose 52 million workers between now and 2050—unless it begins embracing immigrants fast.

PHOTOS

Exposing Europe's Invisible Army

The 'new Europeans'—illegal immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers on the continent.

By Stefan Theil | NEWSWEEK

Published Feb 19, 2010

From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010

You'd never guess it from the rants of America's talk-radio Jeremiahs, but U.S. immigration policy isn't really a disaster. In fact, Europe has recently begun studying it enviously—or was studying it anyway. Then the recession struck. Now it's open season on foreigners across much of the continent. Italy's interior minister, a member of the xenophobic Northern League, has sent armed carabinieri to clear out camps of jobless migrants in Naples and other parts of the south. In Britain, Tory leader David Cameron recently promised that if his party wins upcoming elections he'll slash immigration by 75 percent—and that's on top of the visa quotas imposed last year by the current Labour government. Ahead of key regional elections in France, President Nicolas Sarkozy has launched a noisy debate about "French identity." Switzerland has outlawed minarets, and France, not to be outdone, is considering a ban on burqas.

The trouble isn't a shortage of immigrants. The European Union has attracted 26 million migrants in the past two decades—a full 30 percent more than America's 20 million over the same span. But most European countries tried to protect homegrown labor by shutting out foreign workers. The efforts mostly backfired, encouraging a massive influx of illegal aliens, who tend to accept rock-bottom wages and benefits because they have no legal recourse. At the same time, Europe's generous social benefits encouraged a massive surge of "welfare tourism." As a result, Europe has ended up with 85 percent of all unskilled migrants to the developed countries but only 5 percent of the highly skilled. Compare that with the United States, which has honed its innovative edge by attracting 55 percent of the world's educated migrants. And because immigration happens largely via networks, with established immigrants paving the way for their peers, such trends tend to endure. "It therefore takes decades to turn immigration policy around," says Thomas Liebig, a migration specialist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

For decades most European countries have consigned immigrants to the margins: in Germany, some professions were restricted to German citizens well into the 1990s, while eligibility for citizenship itself was based on bloodlines until a landmark reform in 2001. Millions of refugees were legally barred from working, which forced them into squalid welfare dependency. Muslims especially remain unintegrated and ghettoized in many European countries, including France, Britain, and the Netherlands. Now many European countries have tabled important policy reforms such as the drafting of a continentwide asylum policy and the formulation of smarter immigration criteria based on education and skills. Others, like Spain and the Czech Re-public, are actually paying migrants to go away. The danger is that Europe's worsening hostility toward foreigners will halt or even reverse efforts to assimilate those who are already there, spawning a fast--growing, permanent underclass. According to the OECD, immigrants have been losing jobs at almost twice the rate of native-born citizens during the current crisis, and in many countries the socioeconomic gap between immigrants and natives has begun to grow again.

All this comes at a critical moment for the global economy. Economists predict that global GDP will double in the next 20 years, and as many as 1 billion new, skilled jobs will be created. To avoid being left behind, Europe will need to upgrade its workforce to compete in knowledge-intensive sectors. It can't afford to neglect the education of its immigrant populations or to give up competing for its share of the global talent pool. If it makes the wrong choice, Europe will become smaller, poorer, and angrier. Instead of attracting newcomers, the continent will watch its own best and brightest decamp for better opportunities in the growing economies of China, India, and Brazil. (The economic booms in Poland and Romania have already been slowed by a severe dearth of skilled workers.)

As Europe fiddles, some countries aren't standing still. At the onset of the global crisis, the Canadian government briefly considered slashing immigration quotas to protect its labor market. It then decided to keep its borders open and even to speed up acceptance procedures for some highly skilled arrivals. While migrants have lost some ground recently, they're still twice as likely as native Canadians to hold doctorates or master's degrees. Even within Europe, there are a few countries doing it right. Sweden wasn't satisfied with merely implementing a new, skills-based immigration policy; it actually upgraded its integration efforts, including language and vocational training for existing immigrants, right in the middle of the crisis. But much more can be done to attract skilled migrants—raising the number of visas available in professions where shortages already exist, for example, or cutting the red tape that can make it all but impossible to get non--European diplomas recognized. Nations and companies could also do a much better job of recruiting more of the -estimated 1.4 million foreign students currently enrolled at European universities.

Europeans' concerns aren't totally misplaced. The rapid pace of immigration over the past decade has strained Britain's infrastructure and social institutions. Germans and the French are particularly worried about the underclass immigrants who have isolated themselves from society at large. But now the continent is facing a pivotal decision. Closing its borders will only divert more migration into illegal and uncontrollable channels. Europe is no defendable, homogenous island; it's surrounded by the wildly growing populations of Africa and the Middle East. Europe's choice is not whether to stop migration, but whether to channel it to its own advantage.

Jan 19, 2010

What the "Eurabia" Authors Get Wrong About Islam in Europe

The shoddy and just plain wrong genre that refuses to die.

BY JUSTIN VAÏSSE | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010

By 2050, Europe will be unrecognizable. Instead of romantic cafes, Paris's Boulevard Saint-Germain will be lined with halal butcheries and hookah bars; the street signs in Berlin will be written in Turkish. School-children from Oslo to Naples will read Quranic verses in class, and women will be veiled.

Despite their Europe-focused content, these books are a largely North American phenomenon. Bat Ye'or (or Gisèle Littman), an Egyptian-born British author, wrote one of the first of the genre in 2005, with Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, which argued that political subservience to a Muslim agenda was turning Europe into an appendage of the Arab world. But most of her recent followers, including Caldwell, the jocular and hyperbolic Mark Steyn, the shallow Bruce Thornton, the more serious Walter Laqueur, and the high-pitched Claire Berlinski and Bruce Bawer, write from the other side of the Atlantic.

It's not that Europeans don't produce books in the same vein. Consider Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci's The Rage and the Pride, a rabid attack on Muslim immigrants, or British columnist Melanie Phillips's Londonistan, castigating the British left for handing over the country to the Muslim Brotherhood. Still, there is no real European version of the Eurabia panic, and the books that do exist tend to be country-specific, and part of a fringe far right. They do not dominate the market, while works by a range of serious scholars, including Italian sociologist Stefano Allievi's work on European Muslims, German cultural anthropologist Werner Schiffauer's studies of political Islam among Turkish immigrants, British sociologist Tariq Modood's Multicultural Politics, and French political scientist Olivier Roy's Globalized Islam, have offered important, data-driven analyses that undermine the facile dichotomies of the Eurabia myth.

But in the United States, the Eurabia books continue to proliferate even today, close to a decade after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which triggered the genre. Part of the explanation lies in the post-9/11 narrative of America besieged by militant Islam -- a clash of civilizations in which Europe is the front line, threatened by internal subversion. "If Europe is unable to assimilate its immigrants, if Europe is a breeding ground for anti-Americanism and Islamic radicalism -- and it is -- this is our problem," Berlinski warns in Menace in Europe (2006). "The threat of the radical Islamists taking over Europe is every bit as great to the United States as was the threat of the Nazis taking over Europe in the 1940s," Tony Blankley writes in The West's Last Chance (2005). "We cannot afford to lose Europe."

In this sense, many of these books offer a variation on the conservative Cold War vision of Europe as vulnerable to the spread of communism -- only now, Muslims have replaced Soviets and Euro-communists as the enemies. The continuity in clichés with the Europhobic literature of the 1970s and 1980s is striking: In both periods Europe is described with terms like appeasing, impotent, asexual, feminine, post-nationalistic, irreligious, apologetic, self-loathing, naive, decadent, and so forth.

Clichés are not the only reason why the foundations of the Eurabia literature are shaky. By relying chiefly on anecdotes rather than data, these books misrepresent the complex evolving picture of Islam in Europe. They also eliminate social and economic conditions, including discrimination, from the picture. "There is considerably more phobia vis-à-vis Westerners and things Western than Islamophobia," Laqueur opines in The Last Days of Europe (2007). Leaving out poverty and racism (which, pace Laqueur, is a daily problem for Europe's nonwhites, Muslim or not), the Eurabia writers overemphasize culture and religion in explaining tensions and lay the blame solely on Muslims.

After the 2005 riots in French banlieues, for example, independent studies pointed to the same factors: police violence, discrimination, unemployment, and a large youth population in the housing projects where the trouble erupted. But the Eurabia authors weren't impressed. Immigrants don't have much to complain about, they claim, so the riots were all about jihad, or, as Caldwell suggests in his recent book, "the Arab cause." "Even if they did not believe in Islam, they believed in Team Islam," he writes.

This is not, of course, to suggest that things are going well. The bleak vignettes and shocking tales about social tensions and violence linked to Islamism, like the killing of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, are indeed part of the picture. But the paradox of this genre is that it dwells on the heated controversies and tensions taking place in Europe while at the same time claiming that Europeans are in denial of their problems. And the emphasis on the anecdotal tends to obscure the fact that, from the fight over minarets in Switzerland to the debate over headscarves in France, current tensions are part of a normal and democratic process of adjustment, not the first signs of an impending catastrophe.

Beyond all the sloppy anecdotal evidence, the Eurabia literature relies on two major false assumptions. The first is demographic. The literature holds that Europe will be Islamic at the end of the century "at the very latest," with Muslim majorities in some European countries "in the foreseeable future," in the words of Bernard Lewis in his 2007 pamphlet, "Europe and Islam." That's because "native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic," Steyn explains in America Alone (2006). "Europe will be semi-Islamic in its politico-cultural character within a generation."

If these books insist so much on the future, it is because current figures are unimpressive. According to the higher range of estimates by the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC), there are already as many as 18 million Muslims in Western Europe, or 4.5 percent of the population. The percentage is even lower for the 27-country European Union as a whole. The future will certainly see an increase, but it's hard to imagine that Europe will even reach the 10 percent mark (except in some countries or cities). For one thing, as the same NIC study indicates and demographers agree, fertility rates among Muslims are sharply declining as children of immigrants gradually conform to prevailing social and economic norms. Nor is immigration still a major source of newly minted European Muslims. Only about 500,000 people a year come legally to Europe from Muslim-majority countries, with an even smaller number coming illegally -- meaning that the annual influx is a fraction of a percent of the European population.

Finally, though the Eurabia books describe Europe as committing "slow motion suicide" (Thornton in Decline and Fall), reality begs to differ -- and increasingly so. According to demographers, in 2008, fertility rates in France and Ireland were more than two children per woman, close to the U.S. (and replacement) level; in Britain and Sweden they were above 1.9. And though in the 1990s European countries set an all-time record for low fertility rates, figures are now rising in all EU states except Germany.

But isn't the uptick due to Muslims? Although migrant women, some of them Muslim, have a negligible impact on overall fertility rates, adding a maximum of 0.1 to any country's average, they contribute substantially to the total number of births, typically 10 to 20 percent in high immigration countries. That is the origin of Mark Steyn's overblown claim that Mohammed is "the most popular baby boy's name in much of the Western world." But it doesn't mean Europe will end up Islamicized.

Caldwell makes a point of highlighting the second and most crucial false assumption of this literature. The British cover of his book asks, "Can Europe be the same with different people in it?" For most of these authors, Muslims are "different people," and Muslim identity is incompatible with anything else -- an assumption they share with Islamists.

But to large majorities of Europe's Muslims, Islam is neither an exclusive identity nor a marching order. Recent poll data from Gallup show that most European Muslims happily combine their national and religious identities, and a 2009 Harvard University working paper by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris demonstrates that in the long term, the basic cultural values of Muslim migrants evolve to conform to the predominant culture of the European society in which they live.

More generally, average European Muslims worry first and foremost about bread-and-butter issues, and to the extent that they are religious, they want to be able to practice religion freely and in decent conditions, not to impose the caliphate. As a 2006 pan-European Pew Research Center study makes clear, "Muslims in Europe worry about their future, but their concern is more economic than religious or cultural," and though there are tensions, these are mostly due to racism, not some grandiose clash of cultures.

The most likely scenario for the next few decades -- increasing integration of Muslims accompanied by continued cultural tensions, occasional terrorist bombings, and differentiated outcomes in various countries -- is a conceptual impossibility for most Eurabia authors because for them Muslims can't really become Europeans. It is, however, already the reality. Maybe it is time they take notice.

Dec 4, 2009

EBO Funds to Target Migrants and IDPs

Image by m.gifford via Flickr

By SAW YAN NAING

Friday, December 4, 2009

The Euro-Burma Office (EBO) will focus funding on Burmese migrant workers and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in ethnic areas where armed conflicts are active, according to the organization's Executive Director, Harn Yawnghwe.

The decision came after the meeting between the Brussels-based EBO and Burmese opposition, civil society groups and ethnic groups in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand from Dec. 1 to 2.

Yawnghwe said his organization wants to strengthen civil society groups assisting migrant workers and IDPs because such people are in need.

Any group wanting to assist migrant workers or IDPs in armed conflict zones in eastern Burma can submit proposals to the EU donors.

“Euro Burma want to set up committees to assist these groups and want to give funds to them. Those who are interested are asked to submit proposals,” said Dr. Thiha Maung, who attended the meeting and is the director of the National Health and Education Committee's (NHEC) health program.

It is likely that the EBO will secure some funding for exile-based aid groups as funding for cross-border activities is unstable and many Western government donors are not willingly providing further cross-border aid to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in exile, he added.

Founded in 1997, the Brussels-based EBO helps the Burmese democracy movement prepare for transition to democracy and keeps the international community informed about the situation in Burma.

Transparency and accountability of funding among border-based NGOs were also discussed at the meeting.

“International donor countries such as Sweden, Norway, Canada and Australia are hoping for change in Burma in 2010 and want to focus aid directly inside Burma if the situation improves after 2010 election,” Thiha Maung said.

Harn Yawnghwe also said the EBO will provide financial supports to opposition parties or ethnic groups that will contest in the general elections in 2010 if they need support. This should not be misconstrued as EBO support for the Burmese regime 2008's constitution and planned 2010 elections, he said.

The aim of supporting those groups is to let them strive for democracy and ethnic rights within any political space that might be opened up by the Burmese regime, he added.

Observers said international donors indicated they want to focus humanitarian assistance directly inside Burma after they identified problems with cross-border aid.

However, observers said both internally-based aid and cross-border aid are needed since both reach different target populations, whether deep inside Burma or on the Thai-Burmese border.

Due to international donors reducing their funding and distancing themselves from cross-border aid projects, Mae Sot-based Mae Tao Clinic is concerned about funding, which has been cut and reduced.

The number of outpatients coming to the clinic has grown by about 20 percent per year, however.

The clinic, which treats Burmese migrants, refugees and Burmese people who cross the border for medical treat, is struggling with a “major funding crisis.” It faces a predicted shortfall of about US $750,000 in 2010, amounting to 25 percent of its operating budget, according to Dr Cynthia Maung writing on the clinic's Web site on Oct. 27.

Other border-based NGO aid groups are also struggling with the funding crisis, which has resulted in anomalous situations across the border. Schoolteachers in Mon State being provided for by funding from donors such as the NHEC, for example, have been working without salaries since June.

Dec 3, 2009

The New Inquisition - The Nation

by Laila Lalami

At a literary festival in New York City some years ago, I was introduced to a French writer who, almost immediately after we shook hands, asked me where I was from. When the answer was "Morocco," he put down his drink and stared at me with anthropological curiosity. We spoke about literature, of course, and discovered a common love for the work of the South African writer J.M. Coetzee, but before long the conversation had turned to Moroccan writers, then to Moroccan writers in France, and then, as I expected it eventually would, to Moroccan immigrants in France--at which point the French writer declared, "If they were all like you, there wouldn't be a problem." His tone suggested he was paying me some sort of compliment, though I found it odd that he would want the 1 million Moroccans in his country to be carbon copies of someone he had barely met and whose views on immigration--had he asked about them--he might not have found quite to his liking. It was only later, when I had returned to my hotel room, that it dawned on me that the profile of the unproblematic Moroccan immigrant he might have had in mind was based solely on conspicuous things. Some of these, like skin color, were purely accidental; others, like sartorial choices or dietary practices, were in my opinion inessential, but from his vantage point perhaps they suggested a smaller degree of "Muslimness."

Cover via Amazon

Was this man really suggesting that I was a more desirable immigrant because I did not look Muslim? We had started our conversation as two equals, two potential friends, two writers discussing literature, but we had ended it as judge and supplicant--the former telling the latter whether or not she would make a suitable immigrant. And why on earth did I not say something on the spot? Why did I not ask him what he meant? Instead, I had stared back at him with what I imagine was dumbfounded perplexity, and then changed the subject. Perhaps if I had confronted him I would have been able to remove the sting of the insult that had lain hidden inside the compliment.

In any case, the man's assertion was a purely theoretical speculation. In practice, there is little evidence that even inconspicuous Muslims are fully accepted in France, or elsewhere in Europe. This was made abundantly clear in September, when Le Monde released video footage from an encounter between Brice Hortefeux, the interior minister of France, and Amine Benalia-Brouch, a young Algerian-French activist. Hortefeux and Benalia-Brouch, who were both attending the summer congress of the center-right party Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, were asked to pose for a photograph. A female onlooker touched Benalia-Brouch on the cheek and, in a voice ringing with approbation, said, "[Benalia-Brouch] is Catholic. He eats pork and drinks beer." "That is true," replied Benalia-Brouch, smiling. "He is our little Arab," the woman continued. Hortefeux added, "Very well. We always need one. When there's one, that's all right. It's when there are a lot of them that there are problems."

Cover of Londonistan

However offensive Hortefeux's statements may be, they are not particularly remarkable. In French politics, anti-immigrant posturing is something of a rite, often performed at the height of election season. When he was still mayor of Paris, and preparing to run for the presidency under the banner of the center-right party Rassemblement pour la République, Jacques Chirac bemoaned the plight of the "French worker," who was driven "mad" by "the noise and the smell" of the immigrant family next door, "with a father, three or four wives, twenty kids, taking in 50,000 Francs in welfare payments without working." After serving a term as president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing took to the pages of Le Figaro Magazine to argue passionately that citizenship laws needed to replace the "right of land" (jus soli, automatic citizenship for those born on French soil) with the "right of blood" (jus sanguinis, citizenship determined through French ancestry). If such a distinction were not made, he warned, France would face "an invasion." The "right of blood" definition of citizenship, depending on how it is interpreted, could have ruled out the writer Alexandre Dumas, the footballer Michel Platini, the actress Isabelle Adjani, the physicist Marie Curie, the composer Maurice Ravel, the singer Charles Aznavour, as well as Nicolas Sarkozy, the current president of France, but perhaps Giscard d'Estaing felt his country could have done without any of them. (France eliminated the jus soli definition of citizenship in 1993 and then reinstated it in a limited form in 1997.)

In 2002 Manuel Valls, the mayor of Evry and a member of the Parti Socialiste, shot to national prominence when he tried to close down a halal supermarket because it did not carry pork or wine. He claimed the store had to "help us maintain some diversity." Two years before his election to the presidency in 2007, Sarkozy promised he would "hose down" the "scum" of the Paris suburbs, where many of the city's Muslims reside. Declarations such as these cut across party lines and constitute what the French press euphemistically calls dérapages, or blunders.

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The reactions to the dérapages are also something of a tradition. Members of the offending politician's party rally behind him, while members of the opposition call him a racist. Meanwhile, leaders of the far right gloat that--at long last!--the mainstream is recognizing something they have been saying for years. After Chirac's infamous "noise and smell" comments, for instance, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the avowedly racist and anti-Semitic leader of the Front National, gleefully insisted that the French would always prefer "the original to a copy."

So it would seem that the perfect Muslim immigrant in France is one who cleans the house, picks up the trash, attends to the infant or, increasingly, fixes the computer, heals the sick and runs the bank, and then disappears in a wisp of smoke, before his presence, his beliefs, his customs, his way of dress, his "noise and smell" offend the particular sensibilities of the general population. France is not alone in wishing that its Muslims were invisible. As anyone who has visited Western Europe in the past few years will tell you, the "Muslim question" is a matter of grave concern.

Cover of The Rage and The Pride

European Muslims have unintentionally revived a whole genre of nonfiction--the alarmist tract, billed as a "searing" yet "necessary" exposé on Europe's impending demise now that it has allowed so many millions of Muslims to settle on its shores. The titles are each more ominous than the last: The Rage and the Pride, by Oriana Fallaci (2002); Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, by Bat Ye'Or (2005); Londonistan, by Melanie Phillips (2006); Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's Too, by Claire Berlinski (2006); and While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within, by Bruce Bawer (2006). The authors rely mostly on tabloid or newspaper accounts; the arguments are simple, or, more accurately, simplistic, and the preferred method of inference is extrapolation.

The latest offering in this genre is Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, by Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a regular contributor to the Financial Times, The New York Times Magazine and many other publications. However, just as Chirac and Sarkozy prefer to say more carefully what Le Pen says bluntly, Caldwell articulates in polite and embellished language what Bawer and others have been saying aggressively for years: Europe is being overrun by Muslim immigrants; these immigrants show no sign of assimilating to European culture and social mores; and as a result, Europe is in danger of becoming an outpost of the Islamic empire.

Image by derek7272 via Flickr

According to Caldwell, European "political and commercial elites" invited immigrants to work on the continent in order to help rebuild the infrastructure that had been destroyed during World War II. These immigrants were expected to take up jobs in construction and, in later waves, jobs that were deemed too menial or too low-paying for "European natives." Immigrants revitalized industries like car manufacturing in the 1950s, but by the 1960s they were already propping up those, like textile mills, that were failing. Deindustrialization, combined with the 1973 oil crisis, resulted in the closing of factories and the loss of thousands of jobs. By then, the immigrants had already settled in Europe indefinitely, had married or brought spouses and had children. "Decade in, decade out," Caldwell writes, "the sentiment of Western European publics, as measured by opinion polls, has been resolutely opposed to mass immigration. But that is the beginning, not the end of our story."

That story, in Caldwell's telling, focuses on the Muslim communities of Europe. The plot involves the physical isolation of rapidly growing numbers of Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Turks, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indians in suburban neighborhoods; high rates of crime and imprisonment; misogynistic practices and anti-Semitic confrontations; and general cultural tensions with mainstream society. The story's climax is the Muslim minority's "demands" for concessions to its religion, laws and customs. The other characters in this high drama are the "self-loathing" European elites, who are in love with the idea of a multicultural society and who close their eyes to any negativity because they feel they have to atone for centuries of colonialism.

However, Caldwell argues, "immigration is not enhancing or validating European culture; it is supplanting it." European Muslims, he warns, are having children at a rate unmatched by the secularized natives. As of 2005, there were approximately 5 million Muslims in France; 3 million in Germany; 1.6 million in Britain; 1 million in Spain; and fewer than 1 million in the Netherlands and in Italy. All told, Muslims account for about 5 percent of the total population of Western Europe; but that may be 5 percent too many, because in Caldwell's estimation, "if one abandons the idea that Western Europeans are rapacious and exploitative by nature, and that Africans, Asians, and other would-be immigrants are inevitably their victims, then the fundamental difference between colonization and labor migration ceases to be obvious."

The comparison between labor migrations of the past fifty years and colonization--the most memorable example of which, in recent history, is European colonialism in Africa and Asia--leaves out such details as invasions by armed troops; the systematic expropriation of land; the exploitation of natural resources to the sole benefit of the settlers; genocide, as happened to an estimated 10 million Congolese; wars of independence that cost millions of lives; and the installation of brutal dictatorships. Unbelievably, Caldwell insists that the immigration of individuals, each one acting independently and for economic or political reasons, not in obeisance to a collective supranational policy or religious mission, is nothing short of colonization.

To continue with Caldwell's story, the Muslims of Europe--and, naturally, the elites who enable them--have led each major European country to a national tragedy: the London underground bombing; the Madrid commuter train attacks; the Paris riots; the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands; and the cartoon crisis in Denmark. He concludes by sounding a pessimistic note on Europe's chances of winning this existential fight for its cultural survival. "Europe finds itself in a contest with Islam for the allegiance of its newcomers," he writes. "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 doctriness, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter."

The assumption here is that Europe's culture was a rigid construct that remained unchanged until the immigrants arrived. But cultures are not static; they change all the time. Of course Europe's culture will change as a result of its demographic shifts, but that change need not (indeed, it should not) be turned into a culture war between Islam and the West. Caldwell's conclusion is also contradictory, coming as it does after 300 pages in which he has argued just the opposite: that Muslims are backward, unemployed, criminal and, until recently, disengaged from the political process. By the time he ends the book, they are suddenly and inexplicably strong enough to "conquer" Europe.

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is the kind of book that will reaffirm the opinions of those who already agree with its author. If you happen to think that the establishment of what is now called "Eurabia" is a matter of time, you will find plenty of support in the many statistics and anecdotes Caldwell culls from newspaper and magazine reports. If, on the other hand, you prefer a more reasoned and complex view of the issues, the simplifications, contradictions and errors in this book will fail to persuade you. Caldwell repeats the thoroughly debunked canard that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were roundly celebrated in the Muslim world: "It was a day of joy in much of the Muslim world, including parts of Muslim Europe." On the contrary, there were demonstrations of solidarity with the families of the victims in nearly every major Muslim capital, from Rabat to Cairo to Tehran. More to the point, when the United States invaded Iraq, under the spurious claim that it possessed weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein had helped plot the 9/11 attacks, were the bombings not greeted with shouts of "U-S-A" in this country? That does not mean that the vast majority of Americans approved of the wholesale killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Simplifying the facts is expedient for Caldwell, however, as it helps bolster the argument he is trying to make, which is that Islam is locked in an inevitable and perpetual civilizational conflict with the West.

Although a large proportion of Europe's immigrants are not Muslim, and although the continent has faced serious economic, political and social challenges at various times over the past fifty years, European Muslims are held to blame for the rise in crime, violence against women, the resurgence of anti-Semitism and homegrown terrorism. For instance, Caldwell examines rates of incarceration in Europe, finds them proportionately higher for Muslims and attributes this finding to their religion and their culture, neither of which, in his view, equip them with the necessary tools for succeeding in the West. Missing from this grim assessment is the stubborn fact that Muslims are more likely than non-Muslims to be prosecuted for minor offenses. In France, where judges and prosecutors have large discretionary powers, noncitizens are significantly more likely to be forced into pretrial detention while their case is being investigated. The sociologist Devah Pager, who teaches at Princeton, also found a strong correlation between crime-control strategies in French local jurisdictions and the ethnic heterogeneity of these jurisdictions. To put it more plainly, crime is not policed in the same way for everyone. Researchers at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands found a similar pattern; they recently published the result of a study showing that Moroccans sit in jail for lighter crimes than ethnic Dutch.

At no time was the question of crime in Muslim neighborhoods debated more hotly than in the fall of 2005, when the Parisian banlieues erupted in riots that lasted three weeks, leading then-President Chirac to declare a state of emergency. The riots were triggered by the deaths of two teenage boys, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who, while fleeing the police, hid in a power station and were electrocuted. Initially, Sarkozy, at the time Chirac's interior minister, claimed that the boys were suspected of robbery, but there was no solid evidence that they committed a crime--they had been playing soccer in a field when they saw police officers and fled to avoid a lengthy process of interrogation. In interviews after the riots, the people of the banlieues often described the teenagers' deaths as a spark but cited as fuel discrimination, isolation and joblessness. The banlieues are ghettos, and as James Baldwin once wrote, "To smash something is the ghetto's chronic need." Though Pascal Mailhos, the head of the French national intelligence services, flatly stated that religious beliefs played no part in the riots, several French politicians blamed, persistently and exclusively, Islam. So does Caldwell: "Even if they did not believe in Islam, they believed in Team Islam." The point here, I suppose, is that Muslims are acting collectively even when they tell you they're not.

Caldwell also suggests that Muslims are far more likely to commit violence against women. Under the heading "Virginity and violence," he writes that "there were forty-five [honor killings] in Germany alone in the first half of the decade." Since the argument here is that Muslims are more inclined to commit homicides against women in the context of "some trespass against sexual propriety," it would have been helpful if Caldwell had included, for the sake of contrast, the number of ethnic German women killed in incidents of domestic violence, as well as numbers for an entirely distinct and recent immigrant group, such as Eastern Europeans. Without such empirical comparisons, it is difficult to see how he can reach the conclusion he does, which is that "such acts make law. They assert sovereignty over a certain part of European territory for a different sexual regime." The label "honor killing" makes violence against women and girls sound like an exotic import rather than the pernicious and all-too-frequent reality that it is. Caldwell doesn't mention that domestic violence has been treated as a criminal problem in Europe thanks to the work of European feminists in the 1960s and '70s, and that now European Muslim feminists are working to create a similar zero-tolerance level about honor killings. Encouragingly, a recent Gallup study found that Muslims in Paris, Berlin and London disapproved of honor killings and crimes of passion about as much as the general French, German and British populations.

One of Caldwell's frequent arguments is that Europeans should be worried about the Islamization of their continent because Muslim women are having children in greater numbers than non-Muslims. As proof for this claim, he cites a working paper from the Vienna Institute of Demography. But recent studies show that birthrates among European Muslim women are declining sharply; for instance, the fertility rate in the Netherlands for Moroccan-born women fell from 4.9 to 2.9 between 1990 and 2005. Turkish-born women had 3.2 children in 1990 and 1.9 in 2005. Similar patterns have been observed in France and Germany. Martin Walker, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, points out that, "broadly speaking, birthrates among immigrants tend to rise or fall to the local statistical norm within two generations." Moreover, the Financial Times, the newspaper for which Caldwell is a columnist, recently published an article that belied all the alarmist claims about Muslim birthrates, concluding, "in short, Islamicisation--let alone sharia law--is not a demographic prospect for Europe."

The fundamental problem with Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is that Caldwell focuses exclusively on the problems with Muslim immigrants without stepping back to assess the general status of the European Muslim community. While he frequently denounces idleness, urban separation and crime by Muslims, he does not see fit to devote any space to the discrimination they face in employment, housing or the justice system, or the successes they have had in fields like science, sports, arts and entertainment. The French even have a term for this wave of young successful Muslims; they call it beurgeoisie. (The word beur is French slang for "North African.")

This flaw in Caldwell's approach is, unfortunately, entirely intentional. Reflections, he writes in his introduction, is a book about Europe, immigration and the place of Islam and Muslims in it, not "a book about the difficulties faced by immigrants and ethnic minorities." He stresses that he will use the term "native" to refer to those of European blood and "immigrant" to refer to those who are from outside Europe, even when they have been citizens of European countries for two or three generations. But by simplifying his terminology and focusing exclusively on the problems immigrants cause, not on those they face, Caldwell has tilted the scales: he does not present a complete view of the relationship between immigrant and native. On the rare occasions (I counted two) when he does mention discrimination, it is to minimize it: "There was certainly measurable discrimination in the European job and housing markets, although it was mild alongside what one might have found in the United States four decades ago." How easy it is to dismiss discrimination when one is not on the receiving end of it. But the statistics on job discrimination defy minimization: while 27 percent of beur university graduates are unemployed in France, the overall unemployment rate for university graduates is just 5 percent.

In effect, this lack of context mirrors the way Muslim immigrants (even those in second and third generations, or those who are probably Muslim in name only) are talked about in newspapers and magazines, on the radio and television: their religion is at the center of any discussion, as if the only thing that defines their political convictions, their votes, their relationship with their neighbors, with people of other religions or with members of the opposite sex is their ability to tell their nisab from their khums.

The thesis that only Islam is to blame for Muslims' supposed inability to assimilate in Europe is far too simplistic to stand the test of reality. In fact, it's just as simplistic as the argument peddled by the Muslim right wing, which is that Islam is the only cure for whatever ails Muslims. When one looks at Muslims on another continent (America, say) the pattern that Caldwell insists has been replicated throughout Europe (ghettoization, crime, violence against women, a resurgence of anti-Semitism, homegrown terrorism and demands for accommodation) does not obtain. In fact, income and education levels of Muslims in America mirror those of the general public. But save for two paragraphs, which appear ten pages before the end of the book, Caldwell avoids this comparison, presumably because it does not fit with his theory.

Caldwell does contrast Muslim immigration to Europe with Latin immigration to America. "The cultural peculiarities of Latin American immigrants," he argues, "are generally antiquated versions of American ones. Latinos have less money, higher labor-force participation, more authoritarian family structures, lower divorce rates, more frequent church attendance...lousier diets, and higher rates of military enlistment than native-born Americans." This, he says, makes Latino culture "perfectly intelligible to any patient American who has ever had a conversation about the past with his parents." But intelligibility did not prevent Glenn Beck from claiming that immigrants were "trying to conquer our culture" or Lou Dobbs from suggesting that the "invasion of illegal aliens" was responsible for a huge (and undocumented) rise in leprosy cases in the United States. The scholar Anouar Majid has cataloged many similarities between the treatment of Latino immigrants in the United States and Muslim immigrants in Europe in his book We Are All Moors. Ironically, Caldwell behaves much like a new convert to a religion: having found an ideology he agrees with, he looks only for the evidence that confirms his beliefs and disregards everything else.

Not surprisingly, Caldwell's assessment of Europe, like his assessment of European Muslims, leaves little room for nuance or complexity. He portrays the continent as a racially, culturally and politically homogenous place and its natives as extremely tolerant, respectful of human rights and largely secular. In his view, Europeans naïvely believed that Muslim workers who came after World War II would not stay. They welcomed the immigrants and muted their own concerns because they were afraid to be called racist. Caldwell makes the entire process of immigration seem like a giant hoax devious Muslims perpetrated on innocent Europeans. "European natives," he writes, "have become steadily less forthright, or more frightened, about expressing their opposition to immigration in public."

But the truth is that Europeans, particularly of the right-wing persuasion, have not been shy at all about opposing immigration. Anti-immigrant sentiment is as old as immigration itself, and Europe is no exception. Over the past few decades, immigration policy has repeatedly been a major theme of general elections in several European countries, including France, Italy and Spain. Still, the typical European one encounters in Reflections is ashamed of his country and unable to stand up to immigrants. Caldwell writes, rather preposterously, "The singing of national anthems and the waving of national flags became, in some countries, the province only of skinheads and soccer hooligans." Elsewhere, he argues that European natives have become so enamored with the idea of multiculturalism that they "know more about Arabic calligraphy and kente cloth" than they know about "Montaigne and Goethe." Of course, this is hyperbole. But strikingly, Caldwell does not wonder how much European Muslims, a great many of whom are graduates of European schools on the continent or outside it, know about these subjects.

While Caldwell blames Muslim immigrants for a range of problems, he reserves part of his scorn for "the spiritual tawdriness" of Europe--which, in his estimation, may be the "biggest liability in preserving its culture." The increasing secularization of Europe caused it to lose its bearings and gradually become vulnerable to "colonization" by "primitive" cultures. "Along the road of European modernization," he writes, "lie the shopping mall, the pierced navel, online gambling, a 50 percent divorce rate, and a high rate of anomie and self-loathing. What makes us so certain that that Europeanization is a road that immigrants will want to travel?" But in fact polls show that attitudes of European Muslims vary from country to country and often display the same regional differences seen among various European publics. For instance, Gallup polls show that Parisian Muslims are more likely than Muslims in Berlin or London to consider adultery "morally acceptable," a pattern that mirrors the larger proportions of native French who find adultery acceptable when compared with Britons or Germans.

For Caldwell, there is a quality of "Europeanness" that, on the one hand, is in danger of being lost because of the mass immigration of Muslims, and, on the other hand, is so idiosyncratic that it is not easily passed to new generations of European Muslims. He appears to suggest that this quality is innate: "[EU expansion] raised hopes that Western European labor needs could be filled by people who more or less thought like Europeans (say, maids from Hungary and machinists from Bulgaria) rather than people who did not (say, maids and machinists from Pakistan and Algeria)." The emphasis is his.

Caldwell argues that intra-European immigration had a higher degree of success because the immigrants who moved within Europe shared religious and cultural beliefs with the natives. Such an optimistic view leaves out inconvenient facts of history. In the early decades of the twentieth century, France brought thousands of Polish workers to its factories and its mines; many lived in suburban ghettos and, despite being Christian, were deemed by the natives to be too attached to their culture and too religious (they were referred to as calotins, or "Holy Joes"). Some French intellectuals and politicians began speaking of "invasion." (Similar accusations were made about Spaniards, Italians and Belgians who later migrated to France.) When the recession of the 1930s put a crunch on the French economy, the government forcibly put Polish immigrants on trains and sent them back home. So the process by which immigrants integrate in European societies has historically been a slow one, even when immigrants "think" like Europeans.

This undiscerning approach leads Caldwell to severe errors of judgment. It is exceedingly disturbing to find so many right-wing leaders receive one form or another of rehabilitation in Reflections. The British conservative politician Enoch Powell--who famously warned that if Britain didn't stop letting in nonwhite immigrants, it would soon be "foaming with much blood"--is described as "morally" wrong but "factually" right. Elsewhere, Caldwell decries the Dutch media's portrayal of the far-right leader Geert Wilders as a "paranoid and sinister bumpkin," while those who speak more conciliatorily about Islam are "spared ridicule." Wilders once compared the Koran with Mein Kampf and proposed that it be banned. This past September, he argued that a tax of 1,000 euros should be levied against Muslim women who wear a headscarf because they "pollute" the landscape.

Pim Fortuyn, the notorious Dutch far-right leader, "was not a racist," Caldwell informs us, "and his colorful repartee about the Moroccan men he had slept with was adequate to place him above the suspicion of being one." By the same logic, should one forget that Strom Thurmond supported racist laws just because he had a black child? Caldwell writes wistfully that "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." Even though Muslims had nothing to do with Fortuyn's murder, this formulation suggests that, somehow, they did.

Not coincidentally, several of the loudest forecasters of European doom were previously best known for their anti-Semitic views. Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, once called the Holocaust an "extremely profitable lie." Nowadays, he asks that Muslims be prevented from flying into or out of Britain and runs ads with the slogan Enoch Powell Was Right. Vlaams Belang, the Flemish far-right party, has also had Holocaust deniers in its leadership, though now they seem most preoccupied with preventing Muslim women who wear the headscarf from working for local councils. And Le Pen, the founder of the French National Front, once described gas chambers as "a mere detail of history" and called a political opponent named Michel Durafour "Durafour crématoire" (the pun can be loosely translated as "Michel-hard-to-cook-in-a-gas-chamber"). Now he warns that it is only a matter of time before the mayor of Marseille will no longer be Mr. Gaudin but Mr. "Ben Gaudin." Recently it emerged that the Vlaams Belang and other far-right groups have formed a coalition called "Cities Against Islamisation." Europe has gone down this road before, and it did not emerge the better for it.

The societies of Europe are undergoing demographic changes, which have economic, social and educational consequences. So far, the debate on these changes has focused exclusively on Islam in Europe. Yet no one in the chattering classes seems to have noticed that the voices of European Muslims are seldom heard. This is a debate about them--not with them. And indeed Reflections on the Revolution in Europe has been reviewed in the American press mostly by people who are not European, much less Muslim. Not surprisingly, the argument that Muslims are collectively trying to "conquer" Europe "street by street" in order to turn it into an outpost of Islam has been taken at face value. But this argument is not serious criticism because it is not based on thorough empirical evidence; it is racism.

When European Muslims are heard from, it is often on the topic of religion, and usually immediately after some disaster caused by one of their co-religionists. Political leaders, eager to show that they are in dialogue with the "immigrants" (large proportions of whom are second- or third-generation citizens), quote from the Koran or invite some imam to tea at the presidential palace. The conversation turns into a battle over religion, over who has the right interpretation of what verse, instead of being expanded to the issues most relevant to the integration of European Muslims--issues like jobs, housing, education and civil rights.

The current debate places far too much emphasis on Islam as a set of codes and on the Koran as a literal text, rather than on Islam as it is lived and the Koran as an experienced text. A Moroccan man may be very devout and yet work as a sommelier in a restaurant in Paris. A Turkish teenager may not be particularly faithful and yet keep Ramadan because it is the only time of year she gets to connect with her community. An Algerian elder may be the imam of his mosque and yet carry credit card debt. Islam is not just its texts; it is millions of people, each one of whom has found an idiosyncratic way of adapting faith to modern life. Our religious beliefs are not the sum total of our lives. To discuss them as if they were puts our very lives up for debate.

The challenge of immigration is not Europe's alone. In our increasingly globalized world, immigrants are moving in all directions, across large distances and at faster rates than ever before. What Europeans--what all of us--need to face is the unavoidability of living together. Caldwell has culled two tercets from W.H. Auden's "The Quest" as the epigraph for his book:

Could he forget a child's ambition to be old
And institutions where it learned to wash and lie,
He'd tell the truth for which he thinks himself too young,
That everywhere on his horizon, all the sky,
Is now, as always, only waiting to be told
To be his father's house and speak his mother tongue.

Yet when I read Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, I was reminded of another poem, one Auden had written a year earlier, at the onset of World War II; and though the poet came to look with disfavor on the line, its truth is the one I would rather cling to: "We must love one another or die."

About Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami, the author of Secret Son, is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside

Dec 1, 2009

Op-Ed Contributor - The Call From the Swiss Minaret - NYTimes.com

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By CLAUDIO CORDONE

The stunning success of the popular initiative to ban minarets in Switzerland has turned heads around the world. But what does it really mean for Swiss Muslims, and what are the implications and lessons for other European countries?

From a strictly legal point of view, the construction of minarets is now prohibited in Switzerland. No further legislation is required to implement this constitutional provision and there is nothing that federal or cantonal authorities can do to challenge it.

The only avenue for Swiss Muslims to overturn the ban is through the courts the next time an application to construct a mosque is rejected because of it. Such a challenge will no doubt not be long in coming. It should also be successful.

As a great many Swiss and international legal experts have said, the ban is clearly inconsistent with Switzerland’s obligations under international law to respect the freedom of religion and not to discriminate on the grounds of religious belief. Even if the Swiss Federal Supreme Court does not reject the law, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg almost certainly will.

In the meantime, however, the ban will remain in force. And much harm will already have been done. The popularity of the ban — even more than the measure itself — will damage relations between Switzerland’s small Muslim minority and the rest of the population. Extremists on all sides will take encouragement. The integration of Swiss Muslims, the necessary two-way process of respect and adaptation, will inevitably suffer.

The success of the referendum brings with it some long, hard lessons for the Swiss authorities that other European countries and political leaders would also do well to heed.

First, xenophobic and, specifically, Islamophobic sentiment is much more widespread than even the most pessimistic observers had thought. Opinion polls in the run-up to the referendum consistently showed a majority of voters to be opposed to the ban.

How wrong they were. In the privacy of the voting booth, silent prejudices found their voice. The situation is probably similar across Europe; the success of far-right parties in the recent European Parliament elections certainly suggests so. Indeed, the only surprise in Switzerland was how surprised we were.

Second, the failure of civil society and the leading mainstream political parties to campaign aggressively against the referendum was clearly a big mistake.

With lower levels of popular prejudice, the reluctance to engage and give air-time to xenophobic views by debating and challenging them might have worked.

It did not in Switzerland. The absence of vocal, united and consistent opposition to the initiative clearly left the terrain free for the fear-mongering and exaggeration that Islamophobic ideologues thrive on. Other countries should not make the same mistake.

Already, calls are being made for similar policies in other European countries. The success of Swiss referendum must, therefore, serve as a wake up call not just for Switzerland, but for the rest of Europe too.

Much more comprehensive measures are needed, across Europe, to combat discrimination and promote the integration of Muslim and immigrant communities. A much greater commitment is needed from political leaders, from civil society — from all moderate, tolerant voices — to expose, confront and counter xenophobic views. Complacence is complicity.

The cost of failure is huge. Intolerance lies at the heart of Europe’s most ubiquitous human rights violation — discrimination. Discrimination tears societies apart. Of all continents, Europe should know a thing or two about this.

Claudio Cordone is senior director of Amnesty International.

Nov 14, 2009

BBC - Greek Church acts on crucifix ban

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By Malcolm Brabant
BBC News, Athens

The Greek Orthodox Church is urging Christians across Europe to unite in an appeal against a ban on crucifixes in classrooms in Italy.

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled last week that the presence of crucifixes violated a child's right to freedom of religion.

Greece's Orthodox Church fears the Italian case will set a precedent.

It has called an emergency Holy Synod meeting for next week to devise an action plan.

Although the Greek Orthodox Church has been at odds with Roman Catholicism for 1,000 years, the judicial threat to Christian symbols has acted as a unifying force.

The European Court of Human Rights found that the compulsory display of crucifixes violated parents' rights to educate their children as they saw fit and restricted the right of children to believe or not to believe.

'Worthy symbols'

The head of the Greek Church, Archbishop Ieronymos, shares Catholic complaints that the court is ignoring the role of Christianity in forming Europe's identity.

It is not only minorities that have rights but majorities as well, said the archbishop.

One of his subordinates, Bishop Nicholas from central Greece, lamented that at this rate youngsters will not have any worthy symbols at all to inspire and protect them.

Football and pop idols are very poor substitutes, he said.

The Greek Church has ostensibly intervened in this case in response to an appeal by a Greek mother whose son is studying in Italy.

But without doubt it is concerned that its omnipotence in Greece is under threat.

A human rights group called Helsinki Monitor is seeking to use the Italian case as a precedent.

It has demanded that Greek courts remove icons of Jesus Christ from above the judge's bench and that the gospel no longer be used for swearing oaths in the witness box.

Helsinki Monitor is urging trade unions to challenge the presence of religious symbols in Greek schools.

The socialist government here is also considering imposing new taxes on the Church's vast fortune, but at the same time is urging it to do more to help immigrants and poor Greeks.

Nov 12, 2009

Copenhagen Journal - Push to Build Mosques Is Met With Resistance - NYTimes.com

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By JOHN TAGLIABUE

COPENHAGEN — Paris has its grand mosque, on the Left Bank. So does Rome, the city of the pope. Yet despite a sizable Muslim population, this Danish city has nothing but the occasional tiny storefront Muslim place of worship.

The city, Denmark’s capital, is now inching toward construction of not one, but two grand mosques. In August, the city council approved the construction of a Shiite Muslim mosque, replete with two 104-foot-tall minarets, in an industrial quarter on the site of a former factory. Plans are also afoot for a Sunni mosque. But it has been a long and complicated process, tangled up in local politics and the publication four years ago of cartoons mocking Islam.

The difficulties reflect the tortuous path Denmark has taken in dealing with its immigrants, most of whom are Muslim. Copenhagen in particular has been racked by gang wars, with shootouts and killings in recent months between groups of Hells Angels and immigrant bands.

The turmoil has fed the popularity of an anti-immigrant conservative party, the Danish People’s Party. In city elections scheduled for Nov. 17, the People’s Party, by some estimates, could double the roughly 6 percent of the vote it took in the last municipal election.

Denmark is not alone in grappling with the question. In Italy, the rightist Northern League opposes mosques in Italian cities; in Switzerland, voters will go to the polls on Nov. 29 in a referendum to decide whether to ban the construction of minarets.

In Denmark, it was the cartoons, one of which depicted Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, that gave the initial impetus to a movement for a mosque.

“I wrote a front-page story saying we somehow had to reconnect to the Muslims, to collect money to build a mosque as a sign of solidarity,” said Herbert Pundik, 82, the former editor of the Danish daily Politiken. Mr. Pundik, speaking by phone from Tel Aviv, where he now lives, said that within 24 hours there had been more than 1,000 positive responses. But then the Muslim reaction to the cartoons turned violent, with attacks on Danish embassies in several cities, including Beirut and Damascus.

“The steam went out of the project,” Mr. Pundik said.

Yet it did not die. Bijan Eskandani, the architect of the Shiite mosque, said he found inspiration for his design in the “Persian element in Islamic art,” which he said consisted of a “special lyric, poetic attitude.” The Shiite community, he said in written answers to questions, lacked the financial means to acquire a suitable site for a mosque. “The building lot they have is situated in an ugly, unattractive, inharmonious gray factory area,” he said, adding that, “a sparkling mosque there may make a difference.”

The very word Persian sends chills down Martin Henriksen’s spine. “We are against the mosque,” said Mr. Henriksen, 29, one of the People’s Party’s five-member directorate, in an interview in Copenhagen’s Parliament building. “It’s obvious to everyone that the Iranian regime has something to do with it,” he said. “The Iranian regime is based on a fascist identity that we don’t want to set foot in Denmark.”

Since becoming party to the national government coalition in 2001, the People’s Party has helped enact legislation to stem the flow of immigrants and raise the bar for obtaining citizenship. Immigrants, Mr. Henriksen insists, “need to show an ability and a will to become Danes.” He cites past Jewish immigration as an example. “Many Jews have come to Denmark since the 16th century,” he said. “We don’t have discussions about whether to build synagogues.” There are at least four synagogues in the city.

Abdul Wahid Pedersen, whose parents are Scandinavian, converted to Islam years ago. “I was 28, a child of the 60s,” he said. Now 55, he is chairman of a 15-member committee promoting construction of a grand mosque for Copenhagen’s Sunni Muslims.

He concedes that of the estimated 250,000 Muslims in a Danish population of 5.5 million, only about 35,000 are Sunnis. Yet he defends the need for a grand mosque and says that while the Sunni community is not soliciting financing from Saudi Arabia, as the People’s Party contends, he has no problem accepting a donation. “If someone wants to chip in, that is O.K.,” he said, in the shop in a working-class neighborhood where he sells Islamic literature, prayer rugs and other religious objects. “But they will have no influence on running the place.” Mr. Pedersen said his committee was even considering installing wind turbines atop the minarets and covering the mosque’s dome with one large solar panel.

The city’s deputy mayor, Klaus Bondam, 45, defends the right of Muslims to their mosques. The minarets, he said, would be “quite slim towers, we’re not going to be Damascus or Cairo.” The city had also made clear there would be no calling to prayers from the mosques’ minarets. As to the charge of foreign underwriting, Mr. Bondam said it did not concern him as long as the sources were listed openly.

But he said he feared that the debate over the mosques could help the People’s Party double its share of the vote in this month’s local elections to as much as 12 percent. “It’s the little discomfit of people of other religion or background,” he said. “Why can’t they be like me?”

For Toger Seidenfaden, 52, the present editor of Politiken, the People’s Party is “democratic and parliamentary — they are not brownshirts.” But he said they were a “very Danish, nationalist party — they’d like Denmark before globalization.”

On the broad avenue called Njalsgade, where the Sunni mosque is to be built on a vacant lot, Preben Anderson, 61, a bricklayer, said he had nothing against a mosque, though he pointedly said that he could not speak for his neighbors. “We have churches,” he said. “We have to have mosques.” He stood across the street from where weeds and junk now cover the lot where the Sunni mosque could one day stand. One neighborhood resident, asked if he could point out the site where the mosque would be built, professed not to know.

Yet, Per Nielsen, 56, a retired history teacher, said the economic slowdown and the gang wars in nearby neighborhoods were feeding the popularity of the People’s Party. As for the mosque, he said, “There’s very strong pressure — people living here don’t want it.”

Nov 9, 2009

November 9th - The New Yorker

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by George Packer

Germany observes no official holiday on November 9th, the day when, twenty years ago, crowds of stunned, delirious East Germans breached the Berlin Wall. This is because November 9th is also the date on which Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated, in 1918, two days before Germany’s defeat in the First World War. On November 9, 1923, Hitler attempted to overthrow the Weimar Republic, in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. In 1938, November 9th was the Night of Broken Glass, when Nazi gangs attacked Jews and their property across Germany and Austria, foreshadowing the genocide to come. The German calendar is appropriately inconvenient: nothing good is conserved without the active remembrance of something bad. The British writer Timothy Garton Ash has called 1989 the best year in European history. It delivered the Continent from its worst century—the new democratic European unity that began in 1989 was built on fifty million graves.

The chain reaction of nonviolent civic movements in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia seemed like a miracle at the time, and it still does. Anyone who grew up knowing nothing but the Cold War could scarcely imagine that the world wasn’t eternally locked in permafrost. No Hegelian teleology predetermined that Communism would be left on the ash heap of history. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama published his essay “The End of History?,” in which he predicted “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” This proved far too optimistic for the post-Cold War world, and even in Central Europe, where liberal democracy did emerge, the dramatic events that brought it about were messier and chancier than the dreams of neo-conservative philosophers.

The wall came down not because Ronald Reagan stood up and demanded it but because on the evening of November 9th, at a televised press conference in East Berlin, a Party hack named Günter Schabowski flubbed a question about the regime’s new, liberalized travel regulations. Asked when they took effect, Schabowski shrugged, scratched his head, checked some papers, and said, “Immediately,” sending thousands of East Berliners to the wall in a human tide that the German Democratic Republic could not control. Soldiers and Stasi agents didn’t shoot into the crowd, but things could easily have gone otherwise.

The revolutions of 1989 were made possible by a multiplicity of conditions: the courage of East Bloc dissidents and the hundreds of thousands of fellow-citizens who finally joined them; American support for the dissident movements and containment of the Soviet Union; the disastrous economies of the Communist countries; the loss of confidence among ruling-party élites; the crucial forbearance of Mikhail Gorbachev. For Europe’s Communist regimes to disappear so suddenly and bloodlessly (Romania was a different story), everything had to fall into place, above and below, within and without. Such circumstances are improbably rare, and they can’t be mechanically replicated by the laws of history or by divine design or by universal human aspiration. A false lesson drawn from 1989 involves a kind of shallow eschatology of totalitarianism: this is how it always happens—the people rise up, the regime withers and dies, peace and democracy reign. The chaos that followed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was in part a consequence of this thinking. In planning the postwar period in Iraq, George W. Bush and some of his advisers had 1989 in mind—“like Eastern Europe with Arabs,” as one official put it.

The last, briefest, and most thrilling of that year’s peaceful uprisings, the Velvet Revolution, took place in Czechoslovakia. Over the next two decades, it produced a series of successors and imitators in Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia. While they all improved the politics of their respective countries, none of them had a Václav Havel, and none of them created a stable liberal democracy. Whenever things fail to turn out as they did in Central Europe, people tend to react as if history had unaccountably malfunctioned. But if 1989 were the rule and not the exception, then Burmese, Chinese, and Zimbabwean dissidents—who have sacrificed far more than their European counterparts (in China, 1989 meant Tiananmen Square)—would be in power by now.

Perhaps the closest contemporary analogy to the fall of Communism is the democratic movement that is challenging the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has deep social and intellectual roots, a growing mass following, and an enemy state with a hollowed-out ideology. But, unlike the East German soldiers and the Stasi agents, the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij militia are ready to kill. Behind President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, there is no restraining figure like Gorbachev. Iranians will have to find their own way to the fulfillment of their democratic desires. And yet the fact that the nearest counterparts to the thinkers and activists of 1989 are to be found in a non-Western, Muslim country exposes another false lesson of that year: that such things are for Westerners only, that “they” don’t want what “we” want.

A recent Pew poll shows that Germans, Czechs, and Poles remain relatively enthusiastic about democracy and capitalism; Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Lithuanians less so. Former East Germans’ hopes of achieving the living standards of their Western countrymen have not been fulfilled, and the inevitable disappointments have muted anniversary celebrations. Last month in Dresden, a retired schoolteacher acknowledged the pining of some East Germans for their simpler, cozier former lives under state socialism. There’s even a neologism for it: Ostalgie. But, the teacher said, “What matters is that I can talk with an American journalist without going to jail, that I can travel without filling out forms, that I can read what I want to read, that I’m not told what TV station I can watch and not watch, that at school I don’t have to say something that I don’t say in private at home. This is what is decisive to me today.”

Twenty years after the revolutions of 1989, Europe’s bitter half century of armed division is the object of profitable kitsch. At Checkpoint Charlie, in central Berlin, where an East German guard opened the gate at 11:17 P.M. that November 9th, you can now pay a euro to pose with hucksters wearing Soviet, British, French, and American uniforms. Neighborhoods that used to be separated by the wall have become hotbeds of the art scene, the gay scene, and the club scene. Meanwhile, Germans widely regarded the recent election campaign, in which fundamental issues were avoided, as a snooze. Berlin will never again be the hair-trigger focus of global ideological conflict, and Europe’s place at the center of modern history is over. This proves not the failure of 1989 but, rather, its astounding success. No one is prepared to die for European unity, and no one will have to.