Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

  About 38 percent of Bangladeshi men are unemployed in Britain; fewer than 10 percent are unemployed in the United States. British unemployment rates are generally higher than American ones. This, too, accounts for some of the difference. But even when figures are adjusted to reflect general rates of unemployment, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are much more likely to be jobless in Britain than America.

  A key reason for the difference is Britain’s class structure, a stubborn relic of the feudal era. Few manage to escape from Britain’s underclass: Young people of all races from lower-class backgrounds are extremely unlikely to enter higher education. According to the 2003 Education and Child Poverty Report, educational success in Britain is more determined by social class than in any other country in the developed world.18

  Unlike America or other European countries, Britain never experienced an outright revolutionary assault on its feudal social hierarchy. America’s founding fathers declared titles illegal. This did not, of course, eliminate inequality, but at least this declaration enshrined the ideal of classlessness. No social group in Britain has had its privileges forcibly removed. In Britain, you tend to stay where you are born—or in the case of immigrants, you stay as you arrived.

  The United States, moreover, has always been a country of settlers. The idea that an immigrant may arrive penniless on Ellis Island and become, through his thrift and industry, a millionaire is a central and defining trope of American national mythology. Even when it is not true, it is widely believed to be true, which doubtless gives hope and comfort to immigrants who are in fact destined to pack supermarket shelves at minimum wage for the rest of their days. (The propagation of this myth, it is interesting to note, owes much to a particular set of immigrants—American Jews in Hollywood—for whom it has been particularly true. 19) Immigration in Britain is a more recent phenomenon. Although foreigners have come for centuries from its Celtic periphery and from Europe, only recently has Britain experienced mass immigration from vastly different cultures.17

  A much longer historic tradition of relying on immigrant labor makes American employers less likely than their British counterparts to discriminate against immigrants. Moreover, the American legal system punishes discrimination more vigorously than the British one. British laws prohibiting job discrimination were put in place in 1976, some twelve years after the U.S. Civil Rights Act and more than a century after Reconstruction. These laws have resulted in only a few convictions, and compensation to victims has been extremely modest. In the United States, plaintiffs in race-discrimination cases regularly receive handsome legal redress. Britain has no official affirmative action policy. Furthermore, the cost of hiring and firing is higher in Britain than in the United States: British law, for example, requires employers to compensate employees made redundant after two years of service. Such labor market rigidities heighten employers’ unwillingness to take a chance on employees they view as unreliable, reinforcing any tendency to discrimination. 20

  But most important is something less easy to quantify: Immigrants to America have always wanted to become American.

  Not long ago, I discussed the difference between immigrants to the New and Old Worlds in an exchange of letters with the Brazilian poet Nelson Ascher. His response perfectly captures my sense of this:

  Can it perhaps be that American assimilationist traditions and American sexual practices are two sides of the same coin on which E Pluribus Unum is written? Choosing America usually implied accepting Rilke’s dictum “You must change your life,”

  didn’t it? It used to be a decision to become someone else, even to change names: a break with the old countries. It seems most Muslims who went to Europe didn’t really want to become something else, nor did the Europeans want them to become Europeans: That wasn’t written on their mutual social contract. If America is the land of second and third opportunities, where people can reinvent themselves professionally and in other ways many times over throughout their lives, intermarriage and divorce are so many other possibilities in this process. You move to another state, change professions, remarry, convert to another faith, leave the Democrats and start voting Republican, trade the New York Times, say, for the Washington Post, make or lose money. That’s not how things happen in Europe, is it? My dad was born Ferenc Ascher, but for almost 50 years now he has been Francisco. People came to Brazil in order to forget, to erase the past, to get out of history (we have geography, no history). Thus, possibly, many Muslims who opt for the U.S. do it because they are tired of being Muslims and want to keep in the long run, at best, only some culinary habits. Not so in Europe. Half a century ago the Europeans might have convinced their recently arrived Muslims to do the same, but that simply wasn’t the European way, not since the times when the newly arrived barbarians converted to Christianity in order to become Europeans. Western Europe didn’t really want to incorporate the 1 percent of Jews who dressed in the same way as they did, spoke their languages, looked like them and were proud to be Britons, Frenchmen, Germans. How can it cope with 10 percent of Muslims who do not even want to assimilate anymore? Sometimes I think that maybe contemporary Europe has a problem on its hands.

  It is tempting to imagine Zadie’s relentlessly funny London, a pluralistic society of Indians, Pakistanis, and Afro-Caribbeans, as analogous to New York at the turn of the century, with its immigrant culture of Jews, Irish, and Italians. But the analogy is not correct. In the United States, men are encouraged to believe that money and power might come to them at any point in their lives. Not so in Britain, where the idea of upward economic mobility, the ideal of the self-made man, has been subordinated to ancestral hierarchies and the leveling principle of social justice. No wonder certain immigrants— poor, frustrated, socially and sexually alienated, seeing little hope that this will change—are angry. This may not be the source of Islamic radicalism, as Zia imagines, but it’s definitely not the cure for it either.

  WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR US?

  Within days of the September 11 attacks, British prime minister Tony Blair pledged to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the United States. He has done so. Britain has committed far more troops and resources to Afghanistan and Iraq than any other allied power. At every turn, Blair defends the United States both literally and rhetorically.

  According to a 2004 Harris poll, Americans view Britain as our closest ally. The admirably defiant British response to the London Underground bombings suggested to many that this affection was not misplaced. “If these murderous bastards go on for a thousand years,” wrote the Mirror tabloid, “the people of our islands will never be cowed.” 21 The London News Review addressed the terrorists directly: “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” they asked. “This is London. . . . Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you’re trying to do, it’s not going to work. . . . So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city.” 22

  It is tempting, after displays of resolve like this, to believe Britain to be immune to the enmity borne toward America by the rest of Europe. Tempting, but wrong. Two influential segments of the British population, its intellectuals and its Muslim immigrants, loathe the United States with a vitriol that must be appreciated when assessing the solidity of the Anglo-American alliance and its future. This problem is only likely to grow. Indeed, it is perfectly conceivable that Britain could, like France, become a quasi-hostile power within one election.

  This is what al Qaeda hopes. It is what they were striving to achieve by setting off bombs in London. The authors of Jihadi Iraq: Hopes and Dangers—an Islamist strategy document published on the Internet prior to the bombing in 2004 of Madrid’s Atocha train station—theorized that a well-timed terrorist attack could precipitate a British withdrawal from the Gulf. Tony Blair and his supporters strenuously denied that Britain’s presence in Iraq precipitated the terrorist attacks, noting that al Qaeda emerged long before the Iraq War. Indeed, it is quite possible that the bombings would
have occurred even had Britain refused to send troops: On September 27, 2005, French counterterrorism police arrested nine Islamic militants planning a similar attack on the Paris subway system, and France, of course, opposed the war in Iraq.

  Nonetheless, it’s absurd to think that al Qaeda does not number among its aims British withdrawal from the Gulf, just as it numbers among its aims the restoration of the caliphate, the global imposition of Islamic law, the veiling of women, the destruction of Judaism and Hinduism, and the beheading of blasphemers, among other ambitious objectives. With Britain standing in the way of all these aims, the attack on London was what historians would call an overdetermined event. It is puzzling that Blair feels the need to deny this. It is equally puzzling that critics of the war see in this obvious connection an argument in favor of British withdrawal from Iraq, rather than against it. They haven’t asked me, but if they did, I would give them this advice: When in doubt about the proper orientation of your moral compass, point it away from the people who want to behead you. If al Qaeda is disturbed by the presence of British troops in Iraq, this is a sign that the troops are where they should be.

  Al Qaeda’s strategy for changing Britain’s regime and precipitating its flight from the Gulf remains viable, as has already been established in Spain. A few more bombings in London, particularly if they involve chemical, radioactive, or biological weapons, might do the trick. While the United States could weather the loss of Spain from the coalition, the loss of Britain would be a political and military disaster. British troops constitute more than half of the non-American multinational force there and are by many accounts (and for obvious historic reasons) more gifted military administrators than we are.

  While it is consoling to think that the British would never appease terrorists, this has not, historically, been the case. The IRA is thriving. Its bombers have been amnestied. Its political wing, Sinn Fein, has been integrated into mainstream politics. There is a great tradition of courage and defiance in British history, but there is also a significant tradition of appeasement—indeed, the British invented the term—and the recent swelling of British anti-Americanism is not an encouraging sign.

  THE ANTI-AMERICANISM OF BRITISH INTELLECTUALS

  Britain’s intellectual elites, in particular, are gripped by an anti-Americanism unremitting in its petty prejudice, sheer ravening ignorance, awesome self-contentment, and utter lack of critical acuity. In 2002, for example, the British playwright Harold Pinter, having survived an operation for cancer, remarked,

  I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare—the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence: The most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world. . . . The US administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary.23

  Pinter recently won the Nobel Prize for literature despite having written nothing worth reading since 1959. The subtle Swedish sense of humor, I am told, is quite difficult for outsiders to grasp, and this would seem to be a case in point.

  In a 2003 opinion piece in the Telegraph subtly headlined “I Loathe America,” the novelist Margaret Drabble offered these sentiments:

  My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world. . . . There, I have said it. I have tried to control my anti-Americanism, remembering the many Americans that I know and respect, but I can’t keep it down any longer. I detest Disneyfication, I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history. I detest American imperialism, American infantilism, and American triumphalism about victories it didn’t even win. 24

  The reelection of George Bush erased any remaining restraint among British journalists. Americans, wrote Brian Reade of the Mirror, are “self-righteous, gun-totin’, military lovin’, sister marryin’, abortion-hatin’, gay-loathin’, foreigner-despisin’, non-passport ownin’ red-necks, who believe God gave America the biggest dick in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land ‘free and strong.’”25

  Please pause to admire the man’s exquisite command of the cliché.

  The Guardian features a column in which readers write to ask questions about curious everyday phenomena. Why, for example, does water drain counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere? When a reader wrote to ask, “Is there a reliable way of telling the difference between Americans and Canadians? I don’t want to take an instant dislike to the wrong person,” the comment passed without remark. It is a useful thought exercise to imagine any of these words written about blacks, Jews, or in fact any other nationality or ethnic group: it would be unthinkable. Had the editors of the Guardian published the same question about Indians and Pakistanis, they would have been the targets of fatwas and firebombs.

  Salman Rushdie, a man well acquainted with fatwas and firebombs since the publication of The Satanic Verses, reproachfully reported the new climate in London: “Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londoners’ diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted. (‘Americans only care about their own dead.’) American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centeredness: these are the crucial issues.”26 Before spending years cowering in a cupboard following the death sentence pronounced upon him by the Ayatollahs, Rushdie himself was rather a lusty critic of the United States. As Dr. Johnson remarked, however, the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight concentrates the mind wonderfully.

  Less than a month after the bombing in London, British MP George Galloway toured the Arab world. “Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners—Jerusalem and Baghdad,” he told audiences there. “The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The daughters are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent. And some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters. Why? Because they are too weak and too corrupt to do anything about it. . . . It’s not the Muslims who are the terrorists. The biggest terrorists are Bush, and Blair, and Berlusconi, and Aznar, but it is definitely not a clash of civilizations. George Bush doesn’t have any civilization, he doesn’t represent any civilization. We believe in the Prophets, peace be upon them. He believes in the profits, and how to get a piece of them.”27 Stirring words, those, although rather hard to reconcile with the conclusions of the final Volcker Report on the oil-for-food scandal. The committee’s investigators were persuaded that Galloway received some 18 million barrels of oil allocations and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash payments from the former Iraqi regime.28 Given Galloway’s notorious litigiousness (peace be upon you, George!), I should mention that he denies these charges and that I have not seen the evidence against him with my own eyes. That said, were I an Arab parent, I would not let that man anywhere near my daughters.

  Opinions such as Pinter’s and Galloway’s inevitably filter into the mainstream. A February 2003 poll commissioned by Britain’s Channel 4 discovered that Britons viewed the United States, not Iraq or North Korea, as the nation that posed the greatest threat to world peace. The British teachers’ union has passed referendums condemning America, so we may assume anti-Americanism is taught in British schools. Americans in Britain have reported vulgar harassment on buses, in the streets. The expression of unqualified hatred for America has become socially acceptable.

  This anti-Americanism is not a new phenomenon. Like anti-Americanism throughout Europe, it antedates the invasion of Iraq and the presumptively clumsy diplomacy of the Bush administration. The sentiment has historically come in waves. Edward Wakefield, in the 1830s, described Americans as

  [a] people who, though they continually increase in number, make no progress in the art of living; who, in respect
to wealth, knowledge, skill, taste and whatever belongs to civilization, have degenerated from their ancestors . . . who delight in a forced equality, not equality before the law only, but equality against nature and truth; an equality which, to keep the balance always even, rewards the mean rather than the great, and gives more honour to the vile than the noble. . . . We mean, in two words, a people who become rotten before they are ripe.29

  More recently, there were massive protests against Ronald Reagan’s deployment of Pershing II missiles in Europe, and before that, against the Vietnam War. Even after the Second World War, hostile sentiment toward Americans was widespread.

  But this recent outbreak has a new demographic element. Traditionally, Britain’s anti-American elites have been vocal, but they have generally been marginalized as chattering donkeys: They have never been able to exert sufficient influence to unravel the Anglo-American alliance. There are now, however, some 1.6 million Muslim immigrants in Britain, and more worshippers at Britain’s mosques each week than at the Church of England. These immigrants form a highly visible and powerful anti-American vanguard and voting bloc, and their sentiments are particularly hostile toward America.

  Anti-Americanism is a key and inextricable tenet of political Islamism, as is anti-Semitism—just as anti-Semitism was crucial, not incidental, to Nazi ideology. The problem of Islamic radicalism in Britain and the anti-Americanism to which it gives rise will not be solved anytime soon: its historical roots are far too deep. Through the unlikely alliance of the Muslim Right and the British Left, anti-Americanism has escaped its circumscribed association with privileged, self-enamored sophisticates, permeated Britain’s underclass, and become inextricably conflated with a raw strain of racial and religious resentment.