The European Dream

by Jeremy Rifkin

  In 2003, in the city of Lyon, a sixteen-year-old Muslim girl wore a head scarf—the traditional garb among Muslim women—to public school, igniting a political firestorm across France about what should be regarded as appropriate behavior of immigrants living in the country. Teachers at the school saw the girl’s act as provocative and divisive and refused to let her attend class. A 1994 government policy ruling allows schools to prohibit “ostentatious displays” of religious symbols within the schools. France’s official head-scarf mediator, Hanifa Cherifi, attempted to mediate between the girl’s family and local school authorities and eventually succeeded in arranging a compromise between the parties—but not before the French public weighed in on both sides of the issue in a highly charged and polarized debate.53

  The Muslim community argued that the girl’s right to practice her religion and customs was being violated. Government officials, however, made the point that French policy, ever since the founding of the republic, has emphasized the indivisibility of French citizenry, and therefore does not recognize the existence of minorities or separate nations in its midst. Roger Fauroux, president of France’s High Council on Integration, an independent body that advises the government on integration issues, spoke for many of his fellow countrymen, arguing that “there has been one obsession since the French Republic was created: The unity of the French people is fragile so let’s not make it more fragile.”54 On February 12, 2004, the French National Assembly voted by an overwhelming margin of 494 to 36 to ban the wearing of Muslim head scarves and other religious symbols including Christian crosses and Jewish skullcaps in public schools. While the new law reflects the sentiment of the vast majority of French citizens, it served to further anger an already deeply alienated Muslim community living in France.55

  The French assimilationist ideal has been under increasing attack in recent decades, as Muslims and other immigrants have flooded into France. In Marseille, France’s second largest city, where 10 percent of the population is Arab and 17 percent Muslim, the question is becoming, What is authentic French culture? “We are no longer a France of baguettes and berets, but a France of ‘Allah-u akbar’ and mosques,” quipped Mustapha Zergour, the head of a French-Arab radio station in Marseille.56

  The Muslim diasporas are transforming parts of France into a multicultural transnational sphere. Many of the immigrants are poor, discriminated against, jobless, and living in squalid urban and suburban ghettos with high crime rates. They are regarded with increasing suspicion and fear among the older entrenched French population. At the same time, the dire plight of many young Muslims is pushing some toward extreme religious fundamentalism. Al Qaeda and other militant Muslim groups have been successful in recruiting Muslim youth into terrorist cells, casting fear among Frenchmen everywhere in the country.

  In 2003, the French government established the French Council of the Muslim Faith, an organization whose function is to represent the Muslim community at the national level. France is also experimenting, for the first time, with affirmative action programs in an effort to lift the prospects of poor Muslim youth.57

  France is not the only country in Europe confronted with a growing population of Muslim immigrants. There are now more than ten million Muslim immigrants living inside the European Union, in addition to another five million Muslims who have lived in places like Bosnia, Albania, and Kosovo for centuries. Europe is expected to take in ten million more Muslims in the next ten years alone, and if Turkey becomes part of the Union, sixty million more Muslims will join the ranks of EU citizenry. As the native population of Europe ages, demographers estimate that a younger Muslim population sporting larger families will soon come to make up more than 10 percent of the European population, and maybe much more by mid-century. Already, Muslim Turks in Germany, Muslim Pakistanis in the U.K., and Muslim Moroccans in Spain make up sizable cultural diasporas.58 Their presence is transforming their new homelands. Writing in The New York Times Magazine, Timothy Garton Ash reflects on how pervasive the Muslim immigrants’ influence is becoming. He writes, “I have just bought my newspaper from a Muslim news agent, picked up my cleaning from a Muslim cleaner, and collected my prescription from a Muslim pharmacist, all in leafy North Oxford.”59

  The Muslim influence is particularly challenging because Islam has traditionally viewed itself as a universal brotherhood of the faith. One’s allegiance to Islam is supposed to supercede allegiances to any particular culture, place, or political institution. Many devout Muslims believe that one’s first loyalty must be directed toward upholding the faith and expressing solidarity with other Muslims. Loyalty to nation-states has been far less central to the thinking of the Muslim world than in the Christian world. In the post-9/11 era, the uncovering of global Muslim networks channeling financial assistance, political support, and even paramilitary support to terrorist networks was unsettling.

  Growing concern over possible terrorist attacks on European soil became real on March 11, 2004, when Muslims from the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, with suspected links to Al Qaeda, blew up commuter trains in downtown Madrid, killing 200 people and injuring more than 1,500 people. The worst terrorist attack in more than a half century in Europe sent the continent reeling. Within days of the strike, Spanish voters went to the polls in a national election and cast out the center-right Popular Party in favor of the Socialists, in large part to express their opposition to Spain’s decision, a year earlier, to support the U.S. by committing Spanish troops to the Iraqi war. The incoming Socialist Prime Minister, José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, announced that Spain was withdrawing its troops from Iraq and declared the Iraqi war “a disaster” that “hasn’t generated anything but more violence and hate.”60

  Only one of the suspected terrorists in the Madrid bombings was a Spanish citizen. Still, the Spanish public, and Europeans in general, worry that terrorists from outside the Union might find safe havens among local Islamic populations living in Europe, allowing them to recruit new members and establish home-grown cells.

  Although the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, law-abiding citizens of the countries in which they reside, it is probably fair to say that there are at least some whose loyalty to the state is thin in comparison to their loyalty to Islam. (The same might be said of certain Orthodox Jewish sects and fundamentalist Christian communities.) Interestingly, their very universalism makes the Muslim world potentially more comfortable in a globalized society than many others. The challenge is whether the Muslim faith can reinstate the kind of tolerant acceptance of other religions and cultures that was the religion’s moniker at the peak of its influence in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.

  Cultural diasporas are undermining the traditional relationship between a people, property, and territory. For aeons of history, the three were virtually inseparable. No longer. Cultures exist in multiple domains, both virtual and real. As cultural communities disperse throughout the world, they begin to reorganize themselves in ways that more closely resemble nodes in networks. Sophisticated communications and transportation technologies allow members of shared cultures to stay linked socially and commercially across myriad national boundaries. Cultural diasporas provide a vehicle that allows a people to retain their sense of identity while negotiating their way in an increasingly globalized world. In the new era, everything is more mobile. Even property, in the form of capital, credit, and investment, is no longer rigidly attached to territory but free to circulate between nodes within worldwide diaspora networks.

  Seen in a broader perspective, the proliferation of cultural diasporas marks the beginning of the end of the more geographically limited notion of the “public sphere” as a boundaried system inside a nation-state container. Cultural diasporas open the door to the possibility of a truly global public sphere made up of diverse cultural communities that exist both inside and across national boundaries and are no longer determined by territory.

  Yale University anthropologist Arjun Appadurai makes the argumen
t that much of the violence unfolding between cultural groups is the result of not being able to escape the old political logic that ties nation to territory and state.

  This incapacity of many deterritorialized groups to think their way out of the imaginary of the nation-state is itself the cause of much global violence because many movements of emancipation and identity are forced, in their struggles against existing nation-states, to embrace the very imaginary they seek to escape.61

  According to Appadurai, cultural diasporas have yet to create a language “to capture complex, nonterritorial, postnational forms of allegiance.” He concludes by suggesting that “neither popular nor academic thought . . . has come to terms with the difference between being a land of immigrants and being one node in a postnational network of diasporas.”62

  What happens, then, in an era of global labor flows, when people switch from one region of the world to another with the same ease that people used to shift residence from one town to the next? And, if they take their cultural identity with them wherever they take up residence in the world, so they can be “both here and there” at the same time, how are we to go about redefining the politics of geography? Diaspora politics is, by its very nature, transnational and global in its frame of reference and outlook. A Europe made up of cultural diasporas from all over the world becomes, in effect, a global public square.

  The old conventional idea of swearing exclusive allegiance to one’s new land becomes increasingly problematic in a world of cultural diasporas. Can Americans or, for that matter, French, German, or British citizens, ever feel really comfortable sharing their land with people whose allegiances are split? In a world where people take their culture with them, don’t expect immigrants to be readily disposed to make the ultimate sacrifice expected by nation-states—to bear arms in defense of the state and be willing to give one’s life to one’s country.

  But absent this kind of unswerving loyalty to a territorially anchored nation-state, bound by a commonly accepted meta-narrative and ideology to live by, how do disparate peoples get along? What unites them, if not shared territory, loyalty to the state, and a common ideology?

  The answer to the question begins with a willingness to rethink our notion of political space and time in a globalized world. While we’ve discussed various aspects of the spatial and temporal re-orientation occurring in the wake of globalization, two further considerations warrant discussion.

  Living in Multiple Spaces and in Deep Time

  For starters, in a world increasingly made up of cultural diasporas, political space is more complex. Borrowing from Hedley Bull’s idea of a neo-medieval political arrangement, theologian John Milbank of the Univesity of Virginia argues that the idea of “enlightenment simple space” is too limited a notion in a dense, layered, and highly embedded world of contending and overlapping lived realities.63 The space of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on abstract measurement, location, extension, and boundaries, is unable to accommodate the crosscutting loyalties and competing agendas of real communities bumping up against one another in lived spaces. Milbank suggests that the older idea of “gothic complex space” might be a more appropriate metaphor for rethinking spatial categories. 64 In the medieval world, space was more relational than territorial, and boundaries were less fixed and more porous. There were fewer borders separating public and private lives, and human activity was entangled in a complex set of stories that overlapped. Michel Foucault explained the medieval sense of space this way:

  In the Middle Ages there was a hierarchic ensemble of places; sacred places and profane places; protected places and open, exposed places; urban places and rural places (all these concern the real life of men). In cosmological theory, there were the supercelestial places, as opposed to the celestial and the celestial place was in its turn opposed to the terrestrial place. . . . It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places that constituted what could very roughly be called medieval space: the space of emplacement.65

  Cultural diasporas, because they are lived simultaneously both “here and there,” are attached in time, not in space, and are therefore not containable by geography. With people increasingly living in multiple places, with multiple loyalties, political space needs to be redefined in a way that loosens up the old rigidity of bounded territory. Some scholars talk about introducing the idea of Maze Europe, suggesting that fixed borders give way to zones of interactivity, fuzzy or rolling borders held together by multilevel regulatory arrangements.66 That’s beginning to happen in the EU as regions, CSOs, and cultural diasporas interact across traditional nation-state boundaries. It’s also happening at the periphery of the EU. Many countries bordering the EU and even those somewhat removed have entered into various “associational arrangements” with the EU. As commercial, political, and cultural exchanges between the EU and its neighbors increase in density, borders become even fuzzier. Harvard’s John Gerard Ruggie argues that the EU’s very mission, at least in the past, is to unbundle territory.67

  On the other hand, the EU is taking strong measures to ensure its borders against the illegal flow of immigration into the community. The earlier mentioned Schengen Agreement, to develop a unified approach to policing the EU borders and to block the flow of illegal immigration, is being zealously pursued. If it all sounds a bit contradictory, it is. The EU is caught between the old politics of bounded territory and the new politics of global space. It’s trying to accommodate emergent global, political, and commercial realities within the constraints imposed by its members, whose authority and legitimacy are attached to territoriality. It’s no wonder that Jacques Delors, the former European Commission president, referred to the EU as “an unidentified political object.”68

  The EU’s confusion about what constitutes geography in an era of cultural diasporas and globalized commercial flows becomes all the more obvious when the question of bringing new members into the fold is raised. Some of the EU’s architects remember back to their student days in the spring of 1968 when French radicals declared “to hell with borders.”69 The EU claims to be inclusive and says that membership ought to be based on shared universal principles, which leads some observers to suggest a “Europe without shores.”70 While no one seriously entertains the idea of a Europe that potentially envelops the globe, there is a growing recognition that the EU “represents a break with the modern conception of political territoriality.”71

  The most difficult point of trying to establish a politics that transcends territoriality is figuring out how to unite all of the contending forces in a new sense of shared purpose that is as powerful as the age-old territorial imperative. Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the former under-secretary-general for Peacekeeping Operations at the United Nations, put it best: “Having lost the comfort of our geographical boundaries, we must in effect rediscover what creates the bond between humans that constitute a community.”72

  If the new spatial reality is far more complex than the simple geometry of the Enlightenment permits, the changing temporal reference is equally complicated. While the temporality of the older American Dream is all future-directed, the temporality of the emergent European Dream combines all three temporal domains—past, present, and future—in a single gestalt. For Americans, the only real consideration was how to improve one’s lot by making something out of oneself. Striving for a better future, both material and emotional, has been at the root of the American Dream. Most American immigrants chose to forget their past and sacrifice their present for future rewards. The European Dream, by contrast, is far more ambitious. Europeans want to preserve and nurture their cultural heritage, enjoy a good quality of life in the here and now, and create a sustainable world of peace in the near or not too distant future. And, on top of all this, they seek to establish a politics based on inclusivity—that is, honoring everyone’s individual dream equally—a difficult challenge by any stretch of the imagination.

  What we have, then, is a radical new spatial and temporal orienta
tion and a new European Dream that is emerging out of it. Still, missing from the equation is a new social glue that’s powerful enough to bind 455 million people together in common cause. That glue has to be even stronger and more cohesive than the existing social glue that binds people to territorial and nation-state loyalty, if the European Dream is to become a reality.

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  Unity in Diversity

  THE EUROPEAN DREAM is compelling but seems a bit utopian and out of reach. It’s hard to imagine hundreds of millions of people coalescing around such a grand vision. But, then, the idea that people might come together around democratic values and nation-state ideology would probably have seemed equally fanciful and far-fetched in the late medieval era. The question is, What kind of new-shared bond would propel people to transcend their old loyalties and make the European Dream a viable universal dream? Put simply, although it’s no simple task, we’d have to be willing to broaden our sense of attachment from property rights and obligations grounded in territory to universal human rights and obligations grounded in our collective participation on a shared Earth.

  Shared Vulnerabilities and Global Consciousness

  Before the skeptics and cynics dismiss such notions as utterly unachievable, let me say that globalizing forces make such a prospect less unlikely now than in any other period of human history.