The New Old World (94 page)

In Europe, on the other hand, post-war immigration started as a short-run makeshift to meet labour shortages in traditional branches of industry, many soon in decline, leaving migrants in them high and dry, when they were not sent home as temporary
Gastarbeiter
anyway. Their assimilation was never a major preoccupation or programme of the state, and no social consensus was ever constructed around the need for permanent immigrant populations, which—after formal barriers went up in the seventies—continued to grow as families sought reunion and refugees asylum. With de-industrialization, high rates of unemployment in the new communities showed the economic gains
from migrant labour had often been fleeting, and criminalization soon set in—the proportion of the prison population in France composed of young male immigrants approaching American levels for young male blacks. Above all, by far the largest contingent of immigrants came from the Islamic world, not only culturally distant from Europe, but set against it by a long history of mutual hostilities. However disparate by region of origin—Turks in Germany, Subcontinentals in Britain, North and sub-Saharan Africans in France—all are exposed, Caldwell insists, to contemporary forms of Muslim ideology violently inimical to the West. The net result is that by the new century, Europe has blundered unawares into an explosive political problem, that is liable to become steadily more acute as the weight of immigrants in the population rises. The persistence of its elites in minimizing it is not shared by the masses who live closest to it. Only the general economic crisis now gripping the EU is a larger issue for the peoples of the Union.
²⁵

Caldwell sets out to avoid, as he says, either euphemism or alarmism. In the first, he certainly succeeds. In the second, as the title of his book suggests, much less so. In this,
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe
is not unlike Robert Kagan's
Of Paradise and Power
, each offering lucid and hard-headed comparisons between America and Europe—much more compelling about both the US and the EU than conventional liberal wisdom—embedded within a global framework of uncritical neo-conservative assumptions about the world at large. In each case, the locus of aberration is the Middle East, treated as a furnace of terrorist dangers and failed states threatening the West, and casting a baleful glow onto Muslim mindscapes in Europe. The spread of radical Islam is the great danger. If
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe
conceives Salafism much as Burke once did Jacobinism—another ‘armed doctrine'—this is in part because of the way religion as such figures in its argument, taken much more seriously, in a fideist American tradition, than is usual in Europe. Dismissing the
bien-pensant
cant that all major religions are basically at one with each other, Caldwell points to the long and sanguinary record of hostility between the worlds of Christianity and Islam as reason for doubting that growing Muslim populations will be easily integrated into Europe, and expecting an increase in confessional
tensions instead. Ancient belief-systems, on this view, matter, and the animosities between them are not arbitrary, but rooted in doctrinal incompatibility and historical experience.

Completely missing from this account, however, is not only the racist hostility and humiliation widely experienced by Muslim, and other non-European, immigrants at the hands of the rich white state and its officials—police, customs and immigration, benefits—within the Union.
²⁶
Also lacking, no less completely, is any sense of the political basis of contemporary Arab—and by extension, wider Muslim—anger at the West. Imperialist control of the Middle East has been, and remains, perfectly secular, and it is manifestly this massive system of intrusion and domination—compounded, it is true, by the implantation of a theologically justified settler state in Israel—that, far more than differences between the Bible and the Koran, fuels hatred of the infidel. Muslim communities in the EU live under states that collaborate without shame or compunction in Western dominion over the Middle East—the British part in the invasion of Iraq, and the gratuitous installation of a French naval base in the Gulf are the only the latest examples in a long record. It would be surprising if they were quite unmoved by it.

But from this to visions of the EU as a ‘giant safe-house' for terrorists is a long way.
²⁷
The obvious reality is that for the vast majority of Muslims in Europe, religion functions as the protective shell of uprooted and vulnerable communities, rather than as a call to battle against the surrounding societies. Where collective revolt breaks out—the riots in the French
banlieues
are the classic case—it is typically among the least religiously minded of the immigrant populations, disaffected jobless youth. Between praying at the mosque and torching automobiles, there is a wide social gap. What it points to is the underlying reason why the salience of Islam is so easily exaggerated in the literature of alarmism. Immigration to Europe is driven by hopes of economic betterment—political flight is rarer—that are themselves entirely secular. If these are bruised or frustrated, religious consolation can intensify. But the
material aim remains the same, a higher standard of living, and in the long run tends to erode the inherited faith. Consumption is a more powerful force than any confession, as Poland or Iran show. The outward signs of faith can be preserved, even paraded, as any number of ostensibly devout millionaires, of all creeds, testify; but, characteristically, the inner compulsions have gone.
²⁸
In a post-modern society, even before their acquisition, the imagination of worldly goods has the same effect—consumerism without consumption. Where religion lives on, it is as a supplement, or sometimes reaction, to these temptations: not as the principle of an alternative social life. Islam is unlikely to be an exception, as any shopping mall in Cairo or Istanbul will intimate.

This large reservation aside,
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe
delivers one central truth. The emergence of significant immigrant communities arriving from allogenous worlds over which Europe once held sway, many raised in a faith long its principal adversary, was not willed or intended by any significant section of its population, which was never consulted. Even the employers who needed extra supplies of cheap labour typically regarded them as temporary expedients. But out of such passing calculations of advantage came lasting social changes. Whatever else mass immigration has been since the war, it was the antithesis of a project. Could it be viewed as the benign outgrowth of a spontaneous order, Hayek's catallaxy that debars any constructivist purpose? Not even that, for Hayek had drawn the line at free movement of labour across borders, as too threatening to necessary social cohesion. Viewed historically, post-war immigration was the counter-finality of the years that saw the building of the Union, a process not of integration, but of disintegration—that coming-apart of the social fabric whose effects the French sociologist of labour Robert Castel has called ‘disaffiliation'.
²⁹
Belatedly, and inadequately, official measures have sought to stitch some of the rents together again, and official ideology has tried to make of unwanted necessity a
post facto
virtue, presenting the goal of a fully multi-cultural—that is, multi-confessional—diversity as a redemptive objective of the EU to come.
³⁰

The Union in which this aim is proclaimed operates, its citizens are constantly instructed, by consensus. That is the ‘community method', the code of supranational conduct in Europe. Such consensus is confined to those with power, as the modus operandi of a continuing elite consolidation. It has nothing to do with popular consent, which it functions to circumvent. Its elevation to a supreme value in the pantheon of the EU is, nevertheless, at striking variance with the way that successive historians, no less committed to oligarchic principles in their day, conceived the role of diversity in European development. For them, it was essentially conflictual. What had given, and gave, the continent its peculiar dynamism were its internal conflicts, unmatched by any other in their number and intensity. But if that were so, where now did such dynamism lie? Martin Malia, writing a decade later than Morin, saw the problem far more clearly. Contemporary integration, he argued, was altering the internal nature of Europe more profoundly than any development since Carolingian times. For that nature had been defined—much more than by any community of values, whether a universal Christianity, a universal reason or a universal democracy—by division and conflict, as the motors of a creative evolution. Kant had realized this disturbing paradox. For him, it was nature's law that human dispositions could be fully developed only ‘by means of antagonism', or in the famous phrase, men's ‘unsociable sociability'. But if Europe had now actually achieved a
permanent peace, under common laws for all, what could substitute for such antagonisms? The ideal of European unity did not have a mobilizing power comparable to either nationalism or socialism. It was an affair of elites. Still, perhaps the task of creating the first multi-national democracy in history would require a creativity no less than that which once had brought the Europe of Christianity or the Enlightenment into being?
³¹

Prudently, Malia left unspecified the mechanisms that might renew the creative evolution of Europe's previous history. Nothing in his vision suggested that the new task could be accomplished without dynamics comparable to the old—by agreement without division, invention without antagonism. Had he posed the question, what answers could he have ventured? For a long line of classical thinkers, from Machiavelli to Ferguson to Ranke, the form of conflict that most lent vigour to nations was war.
³²
After 1945, no European ever recommended it again. But Guizot had already seen another kind of antagonism as no less dynamic in its effects: conflict not between nations, but between classes. Here too Machiavelli, praising strife between classes in the Roman Republic as the secret of its greatness, had led the way. What has been its fate in the Union? Class struggle was, of course, the guiding principle of the revolutionary wing of the labour movement throughout the first half of the twentieth century. When, in the second half, the mass Communist parties of Western Europe were first quarantined and then cancelled as political forces, the reformist wing was left in command of the field, in the various social-democratic parties that persist today. Originally, they too had spoken of class, and in their own fashion had fought, however moderately, for labour against capital.

But by the time that the regime change of the eighties set in, both the size and cohesion of the industrial working class were
everywhere in decline, and the parties themselves had become electoral machines composed and controlled by upwardly mobile professionals, without roots or attachments in the world of manual labour. Intellectually, post-war social democracy was always relatively barren, borrowing what ideas it had from earlier liberal thinkers—Wicksell, Hobson, Keynes, Beveridge—but was still capable at least of a Crosland or a Meidner. But with the neo-liberal turn of the last decades of the century, full employment and welfare expansion were abandoned as practical objectives, as one social-democratic party after another adopted the reigning agendas of deregulation and privatization, compensated by a smattering of social side-payments. With this loss of their traditional raison d'être, they now face the risk of a widespread collapse of their voter support. In the European elections of mid-2009, the German brand of social-democracy got just 21 per cent of the vote, the French 16 per cent, the British 15 per cent, the Dutch 12 per cent; even in its classic Scandinavian strongholds, the Swedish version could manage no more than 24 per cent, the Danish 21 per cent. So weak has the identity of these parties become that they no longer even form a separate bloc in the European Parliament, having to dilute their grouping with ‘Democrats'. So detached are they from popular opinion, that they have not been able to maintain even the degree of tactical distance from the synarchy in Brussels that parties of the Centre-Right, more aware of electoral hostility to it, have on occasion shown. The thought of any kind of conflict, let alone class struggle, is anathema to them.

The result has been to leave antagonism between immigrants and locals as the one residual principle of conflict, virtually ubiquitous in the western regions of the Union, that is impossible to ignore or repress. In effect, what has happened is that ethno-religious tensions have displaced class antagonisms. The displacement is both a substitution and a corruption of them. Workers, instead of uniting against employers or the state, turn against fellow workers; the poor revile the poor. Nor, objectively speaking, is this pure false consciousness, since in slow-growing economies, immigration can indeed, as Caldwell observes, and contrary to official rhetoric, depress the wages of the least skilled, and increase the cost of welfare rolls. The marked turn to the right of so much of the European working class over recent decades—its electoral shift towards Thatcher in England, to Le Pen and later Sarkozy in France, to the Lega Nord in Italy—has been an expression of a change in its relative position in society. It is no
longer at the bottom of the social hierarchy, because immigrants occupy the rungs below it; yet at the same time it is weaker and more insecure than before, in societies where industry is no longer much honoured and inequality has been steadily rising.

Inequality within Europe; inequality between Europe and the worlds it once dominated. Immigration has deepened the first. But it is driven by the second. That inequality is far larger, and has drawn the millions from Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America who now live in the Union, in search of less hunger, danger and privation. Their arrival is an escape from these, but it is not a remedy for them. Were Europe genuinely concerned by the fate of the rest of the world, it would be spending its resources on disinterested aid to the regions where immigrants come from, not casually importing and then ejecting their labour for its own convenience. But that would indeed require a collective will capable of a true project, instead of the blind workings of the market.