WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Can Europe Find a Way to Discuss Integration?
It’s unsurprising that the issue is coming to a head in Germany, which has the highest right-left differential on views of Islam in Europe, according to Pew. As the BBC points out, the marchers are a mixed bag, ranging from concerned voters to seriously questionable, neo-Nazi types. That’s not entirely the marchers’ fault (though they certainly bear responsibility for the company they keep): almost no mainstream party in mainland Europe will touch immigration with a ten-foot pole.
The result, as Mark Steyn and Andrew Stuttaford have been pointing out at National Review, is that when, “the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain topics, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones.” The respectable Swedish center-right, for instance, has just committed itself to a minority role in a left-wing government until 2022 to keep the Swedish Democrats, an anti-immigration party with neo-Nazi roots, out of office. The SD is now the only party discussing immigration at all in Sweden, however, and so is likely to grow. Germany’s not that bad off, yet, but it’s only the nascent AfD—once seen as a small, almost upper-crust anti-Euro party but now a bit more ambivalent about its relationship with the populist protests—is challenging the consensus.
That’s unfortunate, not least because Europe really does have immigration and assimilation problems—as the immigrants, who often face discrimination, experience alienation, and are shut out from many of the guarantees of European life, will tell you themselves. . . . Europe writ large has not found a way to offer its immigrant populations the same opportunities given to “natives” (a distinction that often stretches to the second or third generation), but at the same time it has been largely unwilling to decrease the volume of immigrants or discuss new measures for integrating them.
Yeah, that’s a recipe for failure.
Related: Stratfor: A War Between Two Worlds. “The current crisis has its origins in the collapse of European hegemony over North Africa after World War II and the Europeans’ need for cheap labor.”