The 9/11 Wars (34 page)

THE MECHANICS OF IMMIGRATION

As the American conservative commentator Christopher Caldwell has usefully pointed out, Europe acquired a large immigrant population of which a substantial proportion define themselves as Muslim ‘in a fit of absence of mind’. Though a provocative formulation, Caldwell’s phrase nicely encapsulates the lack of foresight, management or even recognition of large-scale immigration through the latter half of the last century.
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Few had ever predicted that Europe would become home to tens of millions of Muslims in less than fifty years, and therefore little forward planning was ever done to deal with an eventuality that many could neither envisage nor countenance.
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That influx has naturally created a number of difficult issues specific to the continent.

Immigration to Europe from colonies had grown steadily, especially towards the end of the nineteenth century as European nations began to industrialize. That increase was minimal, however, compared with that which came after the Second World War when, denuded of manpower and money by the conflict, Western nations looked to their former overseas possessions, many still in the process of gaining their independence, for cheap labour. For the French this was mainly Algeria, theoretically part of France until 1962; for the British it was the Caribbean, India, Pakistan (particularly rural areas in the north-eastern lowland regions adjacent to Kashmir which had long supplied recruits to the Merchant Navy) and from the Sylhet region of Bangladesh which also had a long tradition of providing labour. Where former colonial links did not suffice, other sources were found. Germany and Holland, as well as several Scandinavian countries, looked to Turkey. The Dutch brought in substantial numbers of Moroccan workers.

At first, it was intended that such workers would spend only a couple of years in their new host nations, living in relatively isolated communities often on the outskirts or in run-down central neighbourhoods of cities, before returning home. Most did just that. However, not least because employers preferred to avoid the complicated and expensive process of refreshing their diligent, cheap and compliant labour force every couple of years, many ended up staying. Wives and other family members were allowed to join them and communities became, often literally, more concrete as local authorities recognized that having tens of thousands living in shantytowns was a hazard both to public order and to health and replaced makeshift accommodation with more permanent structures. This was done with little genuine planning and as cheaply as possible.

The sites where the earliest workers were more or less dumped had been chosen to maximize ease of access to the heavy industries where most of them worked and minimize their impact on ‘native’ communities. However, it did not take long before there was a strong reaction from local populations, who felt their jobs and, to a lesser extent, lifestyles threatened. By the 1960s governments were beginning to limit entry to family members of existing settled migrants and a relatively small number of asylum-seekers. These restrictions were progressively tightened, particularly as the post-war economic boom gave way to the downturn of the 1970s and mass unemployment. Yet such efforts to restrict the new migration came late.
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By the later 1990s, the population referred to or declaring itself as Muslim in the UK numbered 1.6 million (out of a total of around 60 million), in France around 5 to 6 million (8 to 9.5 per cent), in Germany 4 million and in Holland around 800,000 (5 and 6 per cent of total populations respectively). In all, if the centuries-old 6-million-strong Muslim communities in the Balkans were included, it was thus thought that at the time of the 9/11 attacks just over 20 million Muslims lived in Europe.
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All these communities had three things in common. Firstly, in every country, an increasing proportion of the so-called immigrant population, Muslim or otherwise, had been born locally.
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Secondly, though their conditions varied, almost all the communities designated Muslim in Western Europe scored significantly lower on most social and economic indicators than their ‘host communities’ and many non-Muslim immigrant communities. So, in Holland, at the time of the murder of van Gogh, 27 per cent of Dutch Moroccans and 21 per cent of Dutch Turks were unemployed in contrast to a rate of only 9 per cent among ‘native’ Dutch.
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In the UK, the 2001 census found that Muslims had the poorest health and lowest educational qualifications of all British communities. In 2003 and 2004, British Muslims also suffered the highest unemployment rate, topping 14 per cent, around three times the national average, and young Muslims from sixteen to twenty-four had the highest unemployment rates of anyone at 22 per cent, twice as high as their non-Muslim counterparts.
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In Germany and France, where data are not broken down according to religion, extrapolating from existing statistics indicated that a similar situation prevailed. According to the 2005 data from the National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), unemployment among people of French origin was 9.2 per cent while for those of foreign backgrounds, the rate was 14 per cent. More importantly perhaps, in comparison to a 5 per cent overall employment rate for people of French origin, 26.5 per cent of university graduates with North African backgrounds were unemployed.
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Thirdly, the communities themselves were immensely varied and often remained separated internally between Moroccan Berbers and Arabs, Pakistani Punjabis, Mirpuris and Pashtuns, between the various Kurds who speak the mutually unintelligible Kermanji and Sohrani dialects, and so on. Marriages between immigrants and ‘native-born’ French, German, Danish, Dutch or British men and women often outnumbered those between members of communities portrayed as homogeneous monoliths by outsiders.
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As the profile of such communities evolved, so models developed or discussed by policy-makers to deal with issues of integration and assimilation – the two being far from the same thing – did so too. These also predictably varied enormously between European countries. In the UK, policies were largely based on a strong belief that different cultures could coexist in relative harmony without imposed overarching narratives of national identity as long as the bedrock principles of British society was observed. Given the rather grand name of multiculturalism, seen as irresponsible and naive laissez faire by its critics and as a tolerant celebration of an economically and culturally enriching diversity by its supporters, this model had been under significant strain since the late 1980s. The controversy following the publication of Salman Rushdie’s
Satanic Verses
in 1988 had revealed deep tensions. Subsequent rows over faith schooling, scares over the number of
medressas
and clashes over arranged marriages continued to expose and exacerbate them. One of the problems was that no one was very clear about exactly what the British model actually implied. Did it involve a ‘pure multiculturalism’, in which no single culture was seen as more valid or more ‘native’ than any other, or a softer version, where minorities were allowed very considerable autonomy within a dominant culture? One interpretation, rooted in a rejection of assimilation in the 1960s and heavily influenced by left-wing thinking from the 1980s that had been particularly dominant among those running many of Britain’s inner-city municipal councils, was based on a complicated argument that as citizens had ‘differing needs’ equal treatment meant taking ‘full account … of their differences’ and that ‘equality’ needed therefore to be defined in a culturally sensitive way that was ‘discriminating’ but not ‘discriminatory’.
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Others, such as Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality and a former television executive and presenter, demanded the opposite: that there should be more ‘Britishness’. But what was Britishness? For Phillips, it was ‘an inclusive culture which allows you to be all sorts of strange and eccentric things as long as the core values are accepted’.
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Others defined Britishness very differently, appealing to ideas of island nations, green and pleasant lands, warm beer and even, in the title of one book, the ‘Warrior Race’ that the British apparently constituted.
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In fact, the most British quality of the concept of Britishness appeared to be not only that it was so undefined but that most people were happy for that to be the case. British multiculturalism as a model tended in practice to be a compromise of the sort only acceptable in a country where there is no perceived need for either a fully codified law or a constitution.
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The French model of
laïcité
, an imposed theoretical equality before the law and before a rigorously secular state, had deeper ideological roots than the British model and a more coherent intellectual structure and came in for less criticism within France through the middle years of the decade, though it was often attacked externally. Different models had developed in Germany, Spain, Italy and the Scandinavian countries. In Holland, the system was known as the ‘pillars’ and was based on a denominational segregation where each community had its own schools, trade unions, social associations, even hospitals. Though the system, originally designed to manage the nation’s numerous churches, had largely broken down by the time of van Gogh’s murder, it still allowed, indeed encouraged, Muslim communities to live with a significant degree of separation from the rest of Dutch society and culture. ‘We’ve had a tolerant tradition since the seventeenth century … but a lot of difficult issues here were never discussed. The dark side of multiculturalism has been taboo,’ said van Westelaaken, the late van Gogh’s friend.

Equally, the immigrants themselves developed their own models of integration or assimilation. Often seen as the passive subject of policies or attitudes in their host countries, in fact immigrant communities dynamically developed their own ways of dealing with the situations that they found themselves in. The encounter with the West had been one of the primary drivers for reflection and for religious and political activism throughout the Muslim world from the nineteenth century onwards, and life in late twentieth-century Europe provoked a similar range of responses among immigrant communities. As they had done in countries from Morocco to Indonesia over the previous two centuries, these responses included outright rejection, an attempt to appropriate certain elements deemed compatible with a given vision of culture and belief, wholesale and enthusiastic acceptance and pretty much every possible shade in between. One important determining factor was, of course, conditions in the countries of origin. Turkish immigrants in Germany who came from developed Western Anatolian cities had advantages that arrivals in the UK from poor rural Pakistani villages did not. The difference between the opportunities open to savvy Moroccan townsmen and Berbers from the Rif mountains was huge. So too was the difference in social outlook. Immigrants from Pashtun communities on the north-west frontier of Pakistan were much more conservative as a general rule than those from much more literate and broad-minded Kurdish villages of northern Iraq, for example.

Also significant, despite the heterogeneity of the various immigrant communities, was the political evolution of their countries of origin. Complexes and conflicts from ‘the old country’ were often imported, and new emerging problems in states many thousands of miles away could have a significant effect in Bradford, Rotterdam, Hamburg or elsewhere. With most Dutch Muslim communities coming from relatively stable states such as Turkey and Morocco, Holland was spared some of the backwash of radicalism that troubled other nations. However, parts of the French immigrant population were deeply affected by the savage civil war in Algeria during the 1990s.
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In Britain, in a much less evident way, the radicalization of the Kashmir conflict in the same period led to thousands of young men from communities in the west and north of England travelling to Pakistan not just, as many hundreds of thousands did every year, for family visits but to actively participate in a violent insurgency led by increasingly extremist groups. Another important example of this transfer between immigrants’ countries of origin and the West was the composition of the various organizations that sprang up through the late 1980s and 1990s as representatives of newly vocal communities. Some British groups were close to Saudi Arabia, others to Iran.
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The Muslim Council of Britain which was founded in 1997 and would become the privileged interlocutor of the Labour government elected in that year had strong links to Pakistani Islamist organizations.
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National and ethnic splits riddled the various representative bodies in France. Already in the 1990s European Muslims had become a prize in the internal battle for influence, power and worshippers between the various opposed strands of religious practice seen in the Islamic world with Gulf states, notably Saudi Arabia, pouring funds into bursaries, mosque construction, preaching and public meetings to further the reach of their own rigorously conservative brand of Islam. The contest between various strands of Islamic observance within Europe in the key period of 2004 to 2007 must thus be seen as an extension of both an ongoing struggle within the Islamic world more broadly and the longstanding competition between Muslim states for the loyalty of European Muslim communities. As ever, the 9/11 Wars played out within a framework of older conflicts. As ever, they involved the subtle interplay of a huge range of global and local factors and trends.