The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  Today, Morin thought, a new awareness was emerging of ‘the unparalleled cultural diversity of Europe’ as its most precious patrimony, and of the need to forge a common destiny out of it. Europe’s future was certainly threatened by industrial decline, demographic shrinkage, and the risks of nuclear extermination. But the most immediate menace confronting it was the totalitarian empire of the USSR. For the conflict between capitalism and socialism, in which Morin had once believed, had long been replaced by the opposition between democracy and totalitarianism. Democracy, above all, thrives on diversity and complexity, but in Europe it needed a second wind. Still, a metamorphosis of the continent had already begun, as what internationally had become little more than a province was being transformed into a ‘meta-nation’ capable of yet another Renaissance open to the world.21

  In this late-twentieth-century version of Guizot’s construction, traditional tensions are radicalized into a set of sharper contradictions. The Enlightenment had lauded the plurality of states in Europe. The Romantics had altered this to the value of diversity—not just number, but difference. The Restoration historians had made of diversity also contention—always controlled, however, by compromise. In Morin, Guizot’s proviso is gone, replaced by the self-propelling images of the tornado or water-spout. The result is a continual slide back and forth, often in the same sentence, between variety and conflictuality, without a stopping-place in the middle or at either end. Antagonism, disorder, chaos are no less regularly invoked as positive definitions of what has made Europe than are diversity, inventiveness, complementarity, as if there were no difference between them, and no costs to be paid in equating them. European history unfolds in the benevolent medium of dialogue, and ends in the reassuring arms of democracy, two terms often taken to be all but identical in the bosom of a communicative reason. Yet in the same breath conflict does not end in a static compromise, but spirals upwards in a dynamic synthesis, generating new conflict.

  But at what point, then, does such conflict becomes irreconcilable, antagonism leaving no space for productive exchange or sensible regulation—inter arma silent leges? Morin briefly wonders whether the critical spirit of European culture, the vital negativity that problematizes everything, might be connected with the self-destructive processes that led Europe to disaster, only to wave away the thought with bland advice: ‘That cannot be decided. It must also be problematized’. Appropriately enough, the final definition of the creativity of democracy offered by Penser l’Europe, squaring all circles in the lively manner of the book, appeals to the very same authority that Ranke, flintier in his vision of diversity, invoked for the creativity of war: ‘If democracy tends towards harmony, it is a Heraclitean harmony that integrates conflict’.22

  Whatever else might be said of it, Penser l’Europe, composed with a staccato élan, can certainly be numbered among the most passionate engagements with its subject of the period. However, there is one conspicuous absence in it. In a book about the unity of Europe, Morin had very little to say about the actual Community in which he was living, about which his feelings were plainly cool. This indifference was no doubt related to the strength of his concern, as a former Communist, with the fate of Eastern Europe, at that point still with no prospect of entering the institutions of the prosperous West. But more fundamentally, it can be read as an index of the huge gap between his image of Europe and the ideal that was being increasingly preached, and practised, by the Community as the essence of the new Europe. It was not conflict—above all, not conflict—that was wanted in Brussels. The defining European value, endlessly reiterated at every meeting of the Council, not to speak of pronouncements of the Commission or speeches in the Parliament, was the exact opposite: consensus. So it has remained to this day. In official ideology, such consensus did not, of course, mean uniformity. No attendant value was more infallibly or highly praised than diversity, it too supremely European. Each member-state had its own culture and identity, and—a later discovery—within each nation every region also had its own culture and identity. All were various in their way, but all could agree on matters of common concern, as soon as discussions between them, after a healthy give-and-take, had reached their sensible conclusion.

  Although Penser l’Europe had no time for consensus, it was noticeable that when he came to the present, Morin was remarkably vague about what kinds of salutary conflict were going to keep the vortex of Europe spiralling upwards. There was ecology, of course, and the revolt against authority and hierarchy of 1968, though this was now some twenty years in the past; and then there were the new regional identities. But his treatment of these was so perfunctory that a Eurocrat might well have felt that Morin’s bluff had been called, and that in practice little separated him from the pacification of Brussels, each expounding in their own sphere the virtues of diversity. What neither anticipated were the disconcerting forms this diversity would shortly assume.

  4

  The blind spot was at once intellectual and political, obscuring concept and reality alike. Conceptually, although it was, and still is, often treated as comparable to them, diversity could never be a value of the same kind as liberty, equality or fraternity. It has an intuitive appeal, encapsulated in many a popular saying—‘variety is the spice of life’; ‘it takes all sorts to make a world’—that is not to be discounted.23 Yet by definition, in any stricter sense, diversity is an empty signifier, including all forms and their opposites. The Third Reich added to the diversity of European governments in the thirties; Ceausescu’s regime supplied variegation in the seventies. What is different is not necessarily better or just other; it may be much worse. In current apologies, its validation typically comes from nature: what greater need could there be, for life on earth, than bio-diversity? But nature is a morally indifferent master, as thinkers from Voltaire and Sade to Nietzsche noted, whose law is the survival of the fittest. Its diversity is not juxtaposition, but interconnected destruction, as much as creation. In this as in other cases, natural references are of no benefit to the cultural cause they are supposed to serve. All they offer is a particularly vivid illustration of the value-blankness of diversity as such, and the impossibility of separating it conceptually from antagonism.

  The political myopia was a wider phenomenon. As the Cold War neared its end, immigration had not yet registered on the radar-screen of the European elites as a significant alteration of the post-war landscape. When it eventually did, however, the rhetoric of diversity was at hand to greet it. But now, as the scale of the change sank in, it took more systematic form, in the ideology of multi-culturalism. In North America, where it had originated, this was essentially a response to issues posed by language and race. In Canada, the discourse of multi-culturalism sought both to accommodate the rise of francophone nationalism in Quebec, and to neutralize it by the addition of further communities—Inuit, Amerindian, later Asian—to the roster of cultures entitled to official protection. In the United States, it developed with the growth of black resistance to discrimination and exclusion, more easily handled as the expression of an ethno-cultural identity, and of hispanophone masses, less inclined than earlier arrivals to become monoglot speakers of the state language. Each a historic land of immigration, neither society was confronting questions wholly new to it. Multi-culturalism emerged out of long-standing, if evolving, conditions.24

  Transported to Europe, it was readily adaptable to establishment discourse at Union, if not always at national, level. Diversity of cultures had long been celebrated as one of the attractions of a supranational Community. All that was necessary was to extend the same appeal to differences, not between, but within its member-states, to encompass the new immigrant cultures recently introduced into them. Multi-culturalism fitted the bill perfectly: it was variety without antagonism. But though it bevelled smoothly with the official doctrine that enshrined consensus as the ‘Community method’, it did not with the surrounding realities of immigration. There were two principal reasons for this. To begin with, no
member-state of the EU was founded on overseas immigration, as the United States and Canada always had been and remain, societies whose entire prosperity and identity were constituted, historically, by the arrival of settlers and migrants from other parts of the world, with the elimination or marginalization of earlier inhabitants. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were countries in Europe—France was the leading example, Germany another—that received considerable numbers of immigrants, at times proportionately as many as America. But these entered societies with centuries of continuous cultural and political history behind them, the majority coming from neighbouring lands that were relatively similar, and were assimilated without structural alteration of polity or identity, to a point where little public memory was even left of them.

  Post-war immigration has been a very different matter. Not only because, Europe-wide, it has been far larger in scale. But above all, because it has not been intra- but extra-European in origin—the product, essentially, of the decolonization of Europe’s overseas possessions and what was once its semi-colonial periphery. This meant, of course, that Europe was soon confronted with racial tensions not unlike those in the United States. There, however, the black population could not be regarded as immigrants and had never historically been regarded or treated as such. But in Europe this, as the reception of Caribbean immigration in Britain would show, was—very relatively speaking—the lesser flash-point. The larger one, although the two could rarely be separated in practice, was not race, but religion. Well over half the new immigrants were Muslim. The ideology of multi-culturalism underwent, accordingly, a functional mutation in Europe. With a slide in the meaning of culture from folkways to belief-systems, it became primarily a doctrine of the values of inter-confessional, rather than inter-ethnic, diversity. The regression involved in this move needs little emphasis: where the Enlightenment, not to speak of radical and socialist movements, had looked forward to the disappearance of supernatural beliefs, official and left-liberal opinion now celebrated their multiplication, as if the more religion there was, the better. Typically, of course, proponents of the doctrine did not themselves adhere to any faith, as they celebrated the underlying harmony of believers, themselves generally well aware of the historic enmity, and continuing incompatibility, of their creeds.

  The effect of this twist to the tropes of diversity was, inevitably, a massive repression of the realities of the new immigration in Europe, where the bland pieties of multi-cultural discourse had little connection with the harsh trends under way. By 2009, there were estimated to be some 15 to 18 million Muslim migrants in the richer western states of the EU, comprising a population of 375 million, with the major concentrations in France (perhaps 5.5 million) and Germany (3.6 million), followed by Britain (1.6 million), the Netherlands, Italy and Spain (1 million or so each). Such figures are only rough reckonings, but as percentages they are not large. With the decline of native birth rates below net reproduction levels, however, the proportions are increasing, principally in the big cities where the majority of the newcomers are located. In Brussels, the capital of the EU itself, over half the children born every year are from Muslim immigrants. In Amsterdam, there are more practising Muslims than either Protestants or Catholics. In London an eighth of the population is Muslim. In the major cities of Germany, nearly half the children under fifteen are now from immigrant families. The overall inflow of migrants into Europe is currently some 1.7 million a year, in the same region as legal and illegal immigration to the US. Poverty and unemployment in these communities is nearly always above the national average, discrimination pervasive, and endogamy high. Nowhere does popular opinion favour the presence of the recent arrivals, and in a number of countries—France, Denmark, the Netherlands and Italy have been the most prominent to date—political parties have arisen whose appeal has been based on xenophobic opposition to it. The new diversity has not fostered harmony. It has stoked conflict.

  In the rapidly increasing—scholarly and sensational—literature devoted to immigration within the Union, the most striking contribution has once again come not from Europe itself, but from the United States. Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe breaks free from the prevailing morass of sanctimony and evasion surrounding the subject by the clarity of its historical analysis and sharpness of its comparative perspective. Over the past quarter of a century, Caldwell points out, America’s success in integrating the most recent of its great waves of immigrants—there are now thirty-five million foreign-born citizens in the US—has rested on a set of conditions that have never obtained in Europe. A long-standing and extremely powerful machinery of ideological assimilation—‘procrustean pressures on immigrants to conform’—was in place. The continent still contained a great deal of empty space. The overwhelming bulk of the newcomers came from the Catholic societies of Latin America, cultures more akin than alien to standard US patterns. They found employment in an economy that was already moving rapidly away from traditional industries to services, creating a continually expanding range of low-wage jobs, demanding few skills. They are less stigmatized by colour, or imputed criminality, than native-born blacks, avoiding mass incarceration and automatic occupation of the lowest rungs in social esteem. Even so, resistance to further arrivals, focussing on the estimated eleven million illegal immigrants in the country, has been rising.

  In Europe, on the other hand, post-war immigration started as a short-run makeshift to meet labour shortages in traditional branches of industry, many soon in decline, leaving migrants in them high and dry, when they were not sent home as temporary Gastarbeiter anyway. Their assimilation was never a major preoccupation or programme of the state, and no social consensus was ever constructed around the need for permanent immigrant populations, which—after formal barriers went up in the seventies—continued to grow as families sought reunion and refugees asylum. With de-industrialization, high rates of unemployment in the new communities showed the economic gains from migrant labour had often been fleeting, and criminalization soon set in—the proportion of the prison population in France composed of young male immigrants approaching American levels for young male blacks. Above all, by far the largest contingent of immigrants came from the Islamic world, not only culturally distant from Europe, but set against it by a long history of mutual hostilities. However disparate by region of origin—Turks in Germany, Subcontinentals in Britain, North and sub-Saharan Africans in France—all are exposed, Caldwell insists, to contemporary forms of Muslim ideology violently inimical to the West. The net result is that by the new century, Europe has blundered unawares into an explosive political problem, that is liable to become steadily more acute as the weight of immigrants in the population rises. The persistence of its elites in minimizing it is not shared by the masses who live closest to it. Only the general economic crisis now gripping the EU is a larger issue for the peoples of the Union.25

  Caldwell sets out to avoid, as he says, either euphemism or alarmism. In the first, he certainly succeeds. In the second, as the title of his book suggests, much less so. In this, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is not unlike Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power, each offering lucid and hard-headed comparisons between America and Europe—much more compelling about both the US and the EU than conventional liberal wisdom—embedded within a global framework of uncritical neo-conservative assumptions about the world at large. In each case, the locus of aberration is the Middle East, treated as a furnace of terrorist dangers and failed states threatening the West, and casting a baleful glow onto Muslim mindscapes in Europe. The spread of radical Islam is the great danger. If Reflections on the Revolution in Europe conceives Salafism much as Burke once did Jacobinism—another ‘armed doctrine’—this is in part because of the way religion as such figures in its argument, taken much more seriously, in a fideist American tradition, than is usual in Europe. Dismissing the bien-pensant cant that all major religions are basically at one with each other, Caldwell points to
the long and sanguinary record of hostility between the worlds of Christianity and Islam as reason for doubting that growing Muslim populations will be easily integrated into Europe, and expecting an increase in confessional tensions instead. Ancient belief-systems, on this view, matter, and the animosities between them are not arbitrary, but rooted in doctrinal incompatibility and historical experience.

  Completely missing from this account, however, is not only the racist hostility and humiliation widely experienced by Muslim, and other non-European, immigrants at the hands of the rich white state and its officials—police, customs and immigration, benefits—within the Union.26 Also lacking, no less completely, is any sense of the political basis of contemporary Arab—and by extension, wider Muslim—anger at the West. Imperialist control of the Middle East has been, and remains, perfectly secular, and it is manifestly this massive system of intrusion and domination—compounded, it is true, by the implantation of a theologically justified settler state in Israel—that, far more than differences between the Bible and the Koran, fuels hatred of the infidel. Muslim communities in the EU live under states that collaborate without shame or compunction in Western dominion over the Middle East—the British part in the invasion of Iraq, and the gratuitous installation of a French naval base in the Gulf are the only the latest examples in a long record. It would be surprising if they were quite unmoved by it.

  But from this to visions of the EU as a ‘giant safe-house’ for terrorists is a long way.27 The obvious reality is that for the vast majority of Muslims in Europe, religion functions as the protective shell of uprooted and vulnerable communities, rather than as a call to battle against the surrounding societies. Where collective revolt breaks out—the riots in the French banlieues are the classic case—it is typically among the least religiously minded of the immigrant populations, disaffected jobless youth. Between praying at the mosque and torching automobiles, there is a wide social gap. What it points to is the underlying reason why the salience of Islam is so easily exaggerated in the literature of alarmism. Immigration to Europe is driven by hopes of economic betterment—political flight is rarer—that are themselves entirely secular. If these are bruised or frustrated, religious consolation can intensify. But the material aim remains the same, a higher standard of living, and in the long run tends to erode the inherited faith. Consumption is a more powerful force than any confession, as Poland or Iran show. The outward signs of faith can be preserved, even paraded, as any number of ostensibly devout millionaires, of all creeds, testify; but, characteristically, the inner compulsions have gone.28 In a post-modern society, even before their acquisition, the imagination of worldly goods has the same effect—consumerism without consumption. Where religion lives on, it is as a supplement, or sometimes reaction, to these temptations: not as the principle of an alternative social life. Islam is unlikely to be an exception, as any shopping mall in Cairo or Istanbul will intimate.