THREE MYTHS OF IMMIGRATION

I am giving the Milton K Wong Lecture in Vancouver in June. Entitled ‘What’s Wrong with Multiculturalism? A European Perspective’, it will try to explain to a Canadian audience, for whom multiculturalism has a very different meaning than it does to a European one, the contours of the European debate, as well as my disagreements with both sides. In particular I want to show why both multiculturalists and many of their critics (particularly their rightwing critics) buy into the same set of myths about the history of immigration into Europe, these three in particular:

THE SPECTRE OF LE PEN AND THE SHAME OF THE LEFT

The incumbent candidate falters badly. His main opponent fares barely any better. The candidates from so-called ‘fringe’ parties garner more votes than either of the mainstream ones. The far right gains its biggest success. The only thing striking about the first round of the French elections was that there was nothing striking about it.  It followed the pattern of almost every election across Europe over the past few years.

This Sunday Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande will slug it out in the second round.  Missing, however, will be the politician who delivered probably the most significant result in the first round will, and who arguably will wield the greatest influence upon the French politics in the months to come, whatever the result of the second round: the Front National’s Marine Le Pen.

MYTHS OF ASSIMILATIONISM AND MULTICULTURALISM

Here is my introduction to the discussion on ‘immigration and citizenship’ at last week’s Trudeau Foundation conference on ‘The Making of Citizenship’, about which I have already written. I was part of a double act with Ruben Zaiotti, whose job it was to talk about the Canadian experience. Mine was just to be provocative.

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The debate about immigration and citizenship in Europe is often presented as a debate between multiculturalism and assimilation. Not only does this oversimplify the debate, but the similarities between the two sides are often more important than the differences.  Both sides have broadly bought into a series of common myths about immigration and citizenship:

DOES CANADA HAVE THE ANSWER TO EUROPE’S MULTICULTURAL PROBLEMS?

For someone like me, a European in favour of mass immigration but critical of multiculturalism, the Trudeau Foundation conference on ‘The Making of Citizens’ that took place last week in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was both intriguing and  fascinating. The Foundation was set up in 2001 in memory of former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, a key architect of Canada’s multicultural policy. Its aim is to promote and fund research in the humanities and social sciences and, while not attached to any political party, the Foundation’s work is indelibly stamped with the liberal humanitarianism that many see as Trudeau’s principal political legacy and which, in many ways, has come to shape Canada’s self-definition. Multiculturalism, in this sense, is to Canada as the welfare state is to Britain.

Two themes seemed to run through ‘The Making of Citizens’ conference. The first was the belief that the debate between multiculturalism and its critics maps neatly on to the debate between those who favour immigration and those who are hostile to it; in other words, that those who oppose multiculturalism necessarily oppose immigration and that those who defend immigration can only do so by defending multiculturalism. The second theme was the insistence that Canadian multiculturalism is distinct from the European version, and suffers from none of the defects of the latter.

THE TRAGIC IRONIES OF BREIVIK’S TERROR

Three weeks ago London marked the sixth anniversary of the 7/7 tube bombings. Now Oslo will have its own heart-wrenching day of remembrance every year.  Even for those who lived through 7/7 – not to mention countless other bombings, from IRA to neo-Nazi, that London has witnessed in the past few decades – there was still something viscerally shocking about Anders Breivik’s murderous rampage through Oslo and Utoya, the mindlessness of the massacre combined with its cold-eyed homicidal brutality.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that Breivik’s attack would first be portrayed as an Islamist plot. For some, any form of terrorism is marked ‘Muslim’ and they wish to look no further.  The irony, however, is not just that Breivik’s hatred of Islam should lead to a horror that many took to be Islamic, but also that nothing so resembles Breivik’s mindset as that of an Islamist jihadist.

THE BEST WAY OF DEALING WITH XENOPHOBIA

The New York Times asked me to contribute to a debate, on its online ‘Room for Debate’ pages, on the prospects for the far right in Europe in the wake of the Anders Breivik massacre. The original question was ‘Is Europe becoming more fertile ground for rightwing movements with anti-immigrant sentiments?’ In the end the Times ran the debate under the headline ‘Will the Norway Massacre Deflate Europe’s Right Wing’? My response is primarily to the first question, rather than to the second.

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Far right and populist parties have made major gains in many European countries. Such movements have certainly fed off a diet of racism, anti-Muslim prejudice and anti-immigrant sentiment. It would be simplistic, however, to explain the advance of populism and the far right simply as an expression of an aggressive new climate of racism and Islamophobia. It would be more simplistic still to suggest that such a climate would inevitably create a horror such as the Oslo massacre.

Far right parties throughout Europe draw upon two distinct constituencies. The first is a core of hardline racist bigots– many of these parties, such as the British National Party and the Sweden Democrats emerged out of the neo-fascist swamp and many still live there. The bigots have, however, been joined by a swathe of new supporters whose hostility towards immigrants, minorities and Muslims is shaped less by old-fashioned racism than by a newfangled sense of fear and insecurity. Many have traditionally supported social democratic parties but feel abandoned by organizations that have largely cut links with their working class constituencies.  Polls have shown that, even more than the rest of the population, such supporters appear dissatisfied with their lives, anxious about the future, and distrustful of any figure of authority.

MULTICULTURALISM AND THE ROAD TO 7/7

This is my debut op-ed essay for the New York Times, a reflection on 7/7, multiculturalism and Islamism, which was published today under the title ‘Assimilation’s Failure, Terrorism’s Rise’. The NYT version is (very) slightly shorter than this.

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Six years ago today, on July 7, 2005, Islamic suicide bombers attacked London’s transit system. They blew up three subway trains and a bus, leaving  52 people dead and a nation groping for answers. In one sense the meaning of 7/7 is as clear to Britons as that of 9/11 is to Americans. It was a savage, brutal attack intended to sow mayhem and terror. Yet, whereas 9/11 was the work of a foreign terrorist group, 7/7 was the work of British citizens. The question that haunts London, but which Washington has so far barely had to face, is why four men, three of whom were born and all of whom were brought up in Britain, were gripped by such a fanatic zeal for an irrational, murderous, medieval dogma.

In trying to answer this question, the British authorities have expended much effort on the question of ‘radicalization’. How did the 7/7 terrorists acquire their perverted ideas? In the immediate wake of 7/7 there was much discussion of the role of extremist preachers and of radical mosques. More recently the focus has shifted to universities as recruitment agencies for terrorists.

This obsession with ‘radicalization’, however, misses the point.

I’M STILL A CRITIC OF MULTICULTURALISM, HONEST

I have long been a critic of multiculturalism. And I have debated the issue with Tariq Modood more times than I care remember, including on Start the Week, Newsnight Review, and at public meetings in London, Bristol, Manchester and countless other places. So when The Moral Maze decided this week to debate multiculturalism, in the wake of David Cameron’s speech, and invited Modood to be one of the witnesses, it seemed inevitable that I would be grilling him.

If only life were so simple. As it turned out, I ended up on the ostensibly pro-multiculturalism side, grilling not Modood but Douglas Murray, the self-described ‘neo-conservative’, director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, and himself an acerbic critic of multiculturalism.