Re: Euro wog backlash-what's ugly about it?

atruelove wrote:
MSNBC May 6 issue:
[Europe] After decades of relatively unfettered immigration
and cultural laissez faire when it came to accepting people of
differing values and social mores, there are signs that a potentially
ugly backlash is setting in.
---
What's ugly about it?

Looks attractive to me; in the case of Holland, a thing of genuine
beauty. eg:

QUOTE
Dutch borders have been virtually shut. New immigration is down to a
trickle. The great cosmopolitan port city of Rotterdam just published a
code of conduct requiring Dutch be spoken in public. Parliament
recently legislated a countrywide ban on wearing the burqa in public.
And listen to a prominent Dutch establishment figure describe the new
Dutch Way with immigrants. "We demand a new social contract," says Jan
Wolter Wabeke, High Court Judge in The Hague. "We no longer accept that
people don't learn our language, we require that they send their
daughters to school, and we demand they stop bringing in young brides
from the desert and locking them up in third-floor apartments."
END QUOTE

Full article:

The End of Tolerance
Farewell, multiculturalism. A cartoon backlash is pushing Europe to
insist upon its values.
By Stefan Theil
Newsweek International

March 6, 2006 issue - The world has long looked upon the Dutch as the
very model of a modern, multicultural society. Open and liberal, the
tiny seagoing nation that invented the globalized economy in the 1600s
prided itself on a history of taking in all comers, be they Indonesian
or Turkish, African or Chinese.

How different things look today. Dutch borders have been virtually
shut. New immigration is down to a trickle. The great cosmopolitan port
city of Rotterdam just published a code of conduct requiring Dutch be
spoken in public. Parliament recently legislated a countrywide ban on
wearing the burqa in public. And listen to a prominent Dutch
establishment figure describe the new Dutch Way with immigrants. "We
demand a new social contract," says Jan Wolter Wabeke, High Court Judge
in The Hague. "We no longer accept that people don't learn our
language, we require that they send their daughters to school, and we
demand they stop bringing in young brides from the desert and locking
them up in third-floor apartments."

What's going on here? Weren't the Dutch supposed to be the nicest
people on earth, the most tolerant nation in Europe, a melting pot for
minorities and immigrants since the Renaissance? No longer, and in this
the Dutch are once again at the forefront of changes in Europe. This
time, the Dutch model for Europe is one of multiculturalism besieged,
if not plain defunct.

This helps explain Europe's unusually robust reaction to the cartoon
crisis, which continued last week with riots in Nigeria and Pakistan
that have left over 100 dead. There were apologies, to be sure, for
causing offense after a small Danish paper published a dozen cartoons
of the Prophet Muhammad. But on one point European leaders were united
and bluntly clear: they would not tolerate any limits on European
newspapers' rights to publish. "Freedom of speech is not up for
negotiation," declared Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso,
summing up a consensus that has only grown stronger as the cries of
outrage from the Muslim world grow louder.

Welcome to the end of tolerance, or at least to the nonnegotiable
limits to what Europeans will tolerate. Whether it's the Netherlands'
rediscovery of Dutch communal values, or the universal affirmations of
free speech (to mock religion, or anything else), Europe is everywhere
on the defensive. After decades of relatively unfettered immigration
and cultural laissez faire when it came to accepting people of
differing values and social mores, there are signs that a potentially
ugly backlash is setting in. Even before Jyllands Posten published the
cartoons last fall, Denmark's Minister of Cultural Affairs Brian
Mikkelsen said, "We have gone to war against the multicultural ideology
that says that everything is equally valid." These days, he speaks for
most Europeans. Danes, and Dutch, and a few other countries might be
well on their way to creating multiethnic societies. But make no
mistake: they're no longer willing to tolerate a European melting
pot-a broadly multicultural society-where different cultures live
by widely different norms.

What that portends for Europe is emerging in fits and starts. The
common ground is a realization that past models of integration have
failed. In Germany, which for decades refused to admit it had
immigrants (in theory, they were "guest workers" who would one day go
home), the newly appointed Federal Integration Commissioner Maria
Bohmer now says that this see-no-evil attitude was "wishful thinking,"
to be replaced by what she calls "offensive integration." Part of that
is a new seriousness about improving schools and opportunities for
education, an arena where Germany more than any other country has
failed its immigrant population. But Interior Minister Wolfgang Schuble
has also called on the country to adopt the more muscular Dutch Way.

Ditto for Schuble's counterpart in France, Nicolas Sarkozy. "The French
way of integration no longer works," he said, meaning France's
long-held pretense that its strict public secularism could erase
differences and make newcomers "French." Thus Sarkozy unveiled a new
immigration law earlier this month, a virtual copy of the Dutch
regulations. Sarkozy plans to introduce highly selective immigration,
testing for the "assimilability" of those it admits. A new "contract of
welcome and integration" stipulates learning French and looking for a
job in return for 10-year residence permits and discrimination
protections. Immigrants failing to respect basic Western values face
deportation. "In the case of a woman kept hostage in her home without
learning French, the whole family will be obliged to leave," Sarkozy
said, referring to a practice among Europe's most conservative Muslims
of importing teenage brides.

In particular, Europeans are concerned about Islamists hostile to
Western values and the very idea of integration itself. Often, these
elements drown out the voices of the moderate majority of Muslims.
Dutch Integration Minister Rita Verdonk, one of several top politicians
under death threats from Islamists, plans courses for imams to train in
citizenship and Western values. She demonstrated what that might mean
in front of press cameras in January, telling an imam who refused to
shake her hand because of "religious rules" that he had better learn
Western customs. "Next year I expect to speak to you in Dutch," she
said through an interpreter.

Will such measures advance the ultimate goal of building a "Euro Islam"
more compatible with Europe's values? Unlikely, perhaps, as long as
only 5 percent of the imams in Europe's 6,000 mosques are educated in
Europe. After decades of neglect, Germany and France have finally set
up a small number of Islamic departments at public universities to turn
out locally acculturated preachers. In Britain, the Home Office's
brand-new Advisory Council on Mosques and Imams plans an accreditation
program for Muslim clerics, similar to the systems in place at
Christian churches. When Angela Merkel becomes the first German
chancellor to hold a summit with Muslim leaders in April, setting up a
Germany-wide council of Muslims to partner with the government on
integration and religious issues will be high on the agenda.

But if Europeans aim to build multiethnic societies that play by their
rules, they'll also have to get their heads around the fact that this
new world will be multireligious, too-a fact that poses awkward
challenges. Over much of Europe, for example, established Christian
churches enjoy special state privileges and subsidies. Most mosques, by
contrast, are hidden in converted shops or tenement apartments. In
Copenhagen, a 15-year plan -to build a national mosque has become
mired in red tape and local opposition. A German state recently passed
a law banning a hijab in schools-but not yarmulkes or nun's habits. A
minister in Baden-Wurttemberg last month resigned over an offensive
remark about the local bishop. It's hard to imagine this happening had
the aggrieved party been an imam.

Until such double standards can be abolished and a new equality
established, Europe's new toughness will feel like forced integration.
"It's a form of creating a second-class citizenship," says Tariq
Modood, director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and
Citizenship in Bristol. "All the burden of change is placed on the
immigrant." And if that's not to be the case, then Europeans will
almost certainly have to accord Muslim faiths the same status accorded
Christianity-including, perhaps, a media that voluntarily refrains
from publishing needlessly offensive images of the Prophet, not under
duress from abroad but out of greater respect for local religious
sensibilities.

It's also clear that if Europeans want their immigrants to behave like
Europeans, then they must be willing to accept them as Europeans, too.
That's where many societies that long thought of themselves as
culturally homogenous have problems. "Being German can no longer be
defined on ethnic lines," says Bernd Knopf at the Integration
Commissioner's office. It's an open question whether Germans, Dutch, or
Danes will ever truly accept a multiethnic, multireligious
"Germanness," "Dutchness" or "Danishness." But given the immigrant and
demographic trajectories of Europe's future, there is little choice but
to try.

With Emily Flynn Vencat and Stryker Mcguire in London and Ginny Power
in Paris
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2006 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11569485/site/newsweek/

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