London XXIII: Interesting, If Flawed, Profile of Political Islam in Europe

Foreign Affairs: “Europe’s Angry Muslims,” by Robert S. Leiken, July / August 2005.

A long and generally interesting piece on the complex political sociological dynamics of political Islam in Western Europe.

Particularly refreshing is Leiken’s rejection of the idiotic Franco-phobia of most American commentary on this key subject,

most of which is a knee-jerk reaction to France’s CORRECT refusal to participate in the moronic and deeply counter-productive US invasion of Iraq,

a blunder which, as we have pointed out, Tony Blair is going to have little choice but to repudiate if he is to have ANY hope of staging a successful values confrontation with political Islam in the UK.

Contrary to what many Americans concluded during Washington’s dispute with Paris in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, France is the exception to general European complacency. Well before September 11, France had deployed the most robust counterterrorism regime of any Western country. Irish terrorism may have diverted British attention from jihad, as has Basque terrorism in Spain, but Algerian terrorism worked the opposite effect in France.

To prevent proselytizing among its mostly North African Muslim community, during the 1990s the energetic French state denied asylum to radical Islamists even while they were being welcomed by its neighbors. Fearing … that contagion would turn “the social malaise felt by Muslims in the suburbs of major cities” into extremism and terrorism, the French government cracked down on jihadists, detaining suspects for as long as four days without charging them or allowing them access to a lawyer.

Today no place of worship is off limits to the police in secular France. Hate speech is rewarded with a visit from the police, blacklisting, and the prospect of deportation. These practices are consistent with the strict Gallic assimilationist model that bars religion from the public sphere (hence the headscarf dispute).

This intelligent insight is, unfortunately, partially offset by two critical mistakes:

1) What Leiken wrongly calls a “multi-cultural” approach to Muslim minorities in Europe is, in fact, an “identity politics” approach.

This is not just a matter of semantics.

“Identity politics” focuses on those – usually UN-changeable – aspects of identity that DIVIDE people from one another –

a phenomenon that has been disastrous for political discourse and dynamics in its country of origin, the US, for reasons we discuss in the Cultural History lectures 27 and 28 –

and whose negative effects in Europe Leiken correctly points out, even as he MIS-labels it as “multi-culturalism.”

“Multi-culturalism,” on the contrary, argues for a view of Western societies that are OPEN to the contributions that can be made to a cosmopolitan and inclusive culture by the DIVERSITY of immigrants from different societies …

what former New York City mayor David Dinkins termed “a gorgeous mosaic,”

or what might also be called “the California model,” in which cute guys and girls from ALL different ethnic groups hook up,

and one of whose major advantages is the incredible diversity – AND quality – of cuisines that can be found in the coastal California megalopolises like the Bay Area and So Cal … and

2) His shocking assumption – never argued for, but simply asserted without any evidence – that the US, under the craven coward George W Bush, has somehow come up with a SUCCESSFUL strategy for dealing with these issues,

when, in reality, it is only the simple demographic fact that there are relatively few Muslims in the US – which has made it easy for them to become part of the larger community, as well as their high levels of education and material achievement –

UN-like Europe, where even the relatively small elite group of Muslims sits atop a mostly poor and, even more importantly, socially segregated population that has, generally, NOT been well-integrated to the mainstream of western European societies,

whose basic dynamics, again, Leiken does a good job of laying out …

So while he’s very shrewd about Europe, he remains ridiculously naïve about the reasons these dynamics have NOT occurred in the US,

which undercuts to a considerable extent his favorable treatment of American – as opposed to European – ways of dealing with the challenge of political Islam ...

a challenge from which Bush has – for all the reasons we have laid out numerous times here before – consistently run away in fear …

both of the phenomenon itself AND that any direct values confrontation with political Islamic fundamentalism will upset his Christian right base in the US,

whose fundamentalism is not very different from that which has seized an equally destructive choke hold on Muslim political discourse and dynamics.