Politicus: Trying to put Islam on Europe's agenda
written by: John Vinocur, 21-Sep-04
 | | Francis Fukuyama |
WASHINGTON About nine months ago, Francis Fukuyama, the historian, said that one of the big things distinguishing America from Europe was that, while the United States had staged its great debate on race, Europe hid from dealing frontally with how much Islam it could live with inside its borders.
Now, Fukuyama, author of the celebrated essay "The End of History," has taken this message to the Europeans. In a speech in Germany about two weeks ago, he urged Europe to stop being intimidated about using its right to defend its own humanist culture. He even employed the expression "leitkultur," or leading culture - touchy among Germans because of its supposed elitist resonance - to describe the legitimacy of shoring up a distinctly European identity.
Fukuyama will return to speak in Europe this month and next. His desire to raise the issue of Islam and Europe is intriguing at the least, and surely intrusive for some Europeans. But it reflects a central concern of other leading American academics. Samuel Huntington of Harvard and Bernard Lewis, the Princeton emeritus professor and Middle East expert, men sometimes schematized with Fukuyama as conservatives (although Huntington and Fukuyama are tough critics of aspects of America's involvement in Iraq), have recently questioned the extent of Europe's stability over the coming century as a result of Islam's growing presence.
Huntington has pressed the same line of reasoning in relation to the United States and its Hispanic population, which he regards as markedly less inclined to assimilate the American Creed than previous generations of immigrants. For Huntington, the United States, influenced by what he sees as a multiculturalist and denationalized elite, runs the risk of "bifurcating" into a country studded with Latino cultural and administrative enclaves - with America's practical cohesion and unity of ethos (he calls it Anglo Protestant) damaged or lost in the process.
But Huntington insists Europe's situation vis-à-vis Islam is "more acute." While Fukuyama disagrees with him on the danger of an American disaggregation, pointing to the overriding Christian and conservative tradition of the mass of Latino immigrants to the United States, he says Huntington has performed a great service at home in expropriating the American issue's discussion from the country's nativists and bigots.
In the same manner, and extrapolating the argument onto European circumstances, Lewis is known to think that if Europe does not deal with its Islamic and Arab presence - confronting the arithmetic of Muslim population growth and setting guidelines for Muslim assimilation - then the control of the issue will fall into the hands of racists and fascists.
All this, on both sides of the Atlantic, involves entry onto treacherous terrain.
In America, George Bush and John Kerry have sprinted from campaign trail musing about the future of a challenged American identity, although Bill Clinton, during his second term, called on Americans "to prove we can live without having a dominant European culture." In Europe, apart from its current focus on its relations with Turkey, there is next to nothing that could be described as coherent, pan-European debate about the more vast question of the parameters for Islam's possible integration. In fact, Europe's circumstances are tortured. Beyond considering taking Turkey's Islamic population of 62 million into the European Union, its citizens must also must digest the idea of increasingly ceding their national identities to an elusive (or illusive) EU identity. It's here that the American academics think Europeans have to start actively defining who they are in relation to the Muslims in their midst.
Huntington, in his book "Who Are We?" says that in essence "multiculturalism is anti-European civilization" because "it is basically an anti-Western ideology." In a conversation, he contrasted Hispanic immigrants in the United States with Arab and Turkish immigrants to Europe by saying the Muslims show "greater resistance to integrate."
"I am fascinated by how Europe and the Muslims there are confronted by redefining their religious identity," Huntington said. The forces in play, he found, were such that "Europe may be deeply divided in 25 years."
Lewis, in a little-noted question-and-answer session with the German newspaper Die Welt this summer, predicted Western Europe's coming Islamization. He reiterated this view in private talks with senators here in September.
"Europe will be a part of the Arab West or Maghreb," he told the newspaper. "Migration and demography indicate this. Europeans marry late and have few or no children. But there's strong immigration: Turks in Germany, Arabs in France and Pakistanis in England. At the latest, following current trends, Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population at the end of the 21st century."
Lewis also went on to point out to Die Welt what he saw as ambiguous feelings among Europeans about Muslims and the United States, saying: "In this connection, the European Union could rename itself the community of envy. Europeans have reservations about an America which has surpassed it so clearly. And that's why the Europeans understand the Muslims - because they have similar feelings about America."
Lewis regards plans in France and the Netherlands to train their own French and Dutch imams with national instincts and loyalties as illusory. And although the United States supports Turkey's entry into the EU, other Americans consider naïve the European elite's argument that a link to Turkey will be a bridge to Islam and an example to the Arab world. Rather, they say, the resentment lingering from the Ottoman Empire's historical subjugation of the Arab nation makes unlikely any Turkish secular role-model for the Arabs.
Although France's defense of its secular, republican tradition against Islamic head scarves was seen as an important development, and the Netherlands was cited for a rare level of political frankness in its national debate on Islam, there was concern among the scholars about how stubbornly Europe would make the case for its identity. Reality was also a report this summer from a French government internal security agency telling of 300 areas in the country where separatistlike situations, grouping Islamic fundamentalist preachers, contempt for France and the West, and violence held sway.
In a conversation here, Fukuyama said it would be a mistake, with dangerous exclusionary overtones, for Europe to hold up Christianity as its sole defining mark.
"There is a European culture," he said. "It's subscribing to a broader culture of tolerance. It's not unreasonable for European culture to say, 'You have to accept this.' The Europeans have to end their political correctness and take seriously what's going on."
Published in: International Herald Tribune
|
