Europe’s minorities: Forget asylum-seekers: it’s the people inside who count.

Date: 10/05/03

The real issue for European societies is not how to keep new foreigners out but how to integrate the minorities they already have

TWO young men set off with suicide bombs to Tel Aviv. One carries out his deadly mission, the other fails. Embittered Palestinians? No. Both are Muslim Britons, one indeed born in Britain.

Why did they do it? The easy answer is extremism - learned in Britain. Few British Muslims are extreme in their faith; hardly any, however they feel about Palestine, are in favour of terrorism. Yet those two men are not just nasty mavericks. They symbolise a wide-ranging question with no easy answers: can Europe integrate its mainly new, and growing, minorities?

Ask the habitually tolerant Dutch. The most potent phrase in Dutch politics today is normen en waarden, norms and values. Traditional Dutch ones, of course; yet few Dutch people two years ago had ever heard the phrase, or thought about the values. Then came September 11th, and then a politician called Pim Fortuyn. Suddenly the Dutch elite noticed what ordinary citizens had long believed, but not dared to say: that many of their immigrant neighbours did not (or so the average Dutchman felt) share these Dutch values.

It was a moment of truth, not only for the Netherlands but for the whole of northern Europe. At last, not just were the long-term effects of immigration openly on the agenda but it was permissible to be open about them; in particular, to admit that they would not go away again if only the plebs would put aside those racial and other prejudices which the better-educated, suburban-dwelling liberal elite wouldn't dream of sharing. Fortuyn was shot dead a year ago; his party was soon in chaos. But the veil that decency and goodwill had cast over discussion of such questions has been decisively torn away.

The main noise since then has been about asylum-seekers and how to keep them out. But the real issue is the immigrants, and their descendants, who are already inside. Integrate these, and European societies could cope well enough with the relatively few asylum-seekers.

That demands changes of attitude in the host societies and among the newcomers. In many European countries it has not been achieved: witness the shaky attempt in France, which has 4.2m Muslims, to set up a council in which they can find a political voice. Yet most of rich Europe is scrambling towards this ideal. Rightly so: social disunity could be a huge long-term threat to Europe, and, as the past two years have shown, harmony does not grow on trees.

Count in their locally born descendants, and there may be 12m-15m poor-country “immigrants” inside the EU: Turks and Kurds, Arabs, Asians (mostly from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka), all manner of sub-Saharan Africans, Caribbeans, Latin Americans. Some of these communities are long-established, like the West Indians who were first brought into Britain to meet labour shortages in the 1950s, or the Turks who helped to prolong Germany's Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle that began 40-odd years ago. Some are newer, like the Bangladeshis who have poured into Britain within the past 20 years. But all share two things. First, they are communities, mostly distinct in skin-colour, language and religion from the natives, and not just random collections of individuals. And, second, these communities are not integrated into the society around them.

Just how large they are, from where and settled where, no one knows; in part, because definitions vary. Nordic statistics, for example, tend to lump together new arrivals with the children, even grandchildren, of earlier ones. There are solid reasons for that: the children of, say, brown-skinned, Muslim, poor Pakistanis will certainly be dark, nearly always Muslim, mostly able to speak Urdu, and often, as adults, poor. Yet there are also solid reasons against: nearly all will be vastly more fluent than their parents in the language of their adopted land, and familiar with its ways. And their children, in turn, still more so.

And that is the trap into which most European countries, unwittingly, have fallen. Because natural assimilation has worked in the past, they have sat back to let it do its natural work again.

That was not absurd. Most of Britain's 300,000 Jews are descended from east European immigrants of around 1880-1910. When these arrived, they too were concentrated in poor east London; they too spoke foreign tongues, had their own religion and habits, and were often disliked by the natives, some better-off and long-established Jews included. And officialdom lifted barely a finger to turn them into Britons. That was left to the - often vigorous - efforts of sympathetic, or worried, Jews already in place. Yet by now Britain's Jews (the Hasidim apart) are as assimilated, as British, as any descendants of the Angles or Normans. They did it; why not leave others alone today to do the same?

Because things have changed. Today's newcomers have come fast, and in far greater numbers. They are, literally, more visible to the eyes of native prejudice; and, the spirit of 2000 being far from that of 1900, they - and still more their children - are likelier to resent prejudice than to hunker down, hope not to be noticed and put up with it when they are. Nor have many shown the vigour that saw Britain's Jews spread where they chose and win the acceptance that education, money and a position in the world habitually buy; Britain's Gujaratis, originally from western India, are a parallel case, but a rare one. Maybe all should have assimilated, but the fact is they haven't.

So it is that Oslo has its “little Karachi”; that to Berliners the Kreuzberg district means Turks; that a Parisian calls Montreuil, just to the east, “the second capital of Mali”; that you can count 20 pupils coming out of a Rotterdam primary school before you spot the first obviously Dutch one.

Two halves make a whole

Yet, until recently, few but specialists asked: what is to be done? Britain's Race Relations Board, set up in 1966, has grappled with the question only to reach, in most cases, the usual answer: teach the natives to be less prejudiced. That is a worthy reply, but only half of one. The other half should have been to ask what solid reasons might lie behind the prejudice, and what could be done about them, not least by the minorities at issue. To ask such things was almost like blaming Jews for anti-Semitism. But the answer to both questions is, quite a lot - some of it just the reverse of what good-willed people have done till now.

Go back to the Dutch. Their society was for centuries built on the “mosaic”, not “melting-pot”, notion of integration: we are Catholics and Protestants (and more), we have each our own churches, schools, even sports clubs. But we live in mutual respect, we're all Dutch. Then in late 2001 they got a shock, symbolised by a magazine poll that asked Muslims their view of the September 11th attacks. A bad thing, said 61%. Fair enough? No: what kind of community is it where 39% do not automatically condemn the murder of 3,000 innocents? Not much of one, said the native Dutch - and “not like us”.

So? One response was gut hostility to at least the Arab incomers: the word Marokkanen, preceded by an obscenity, was soon in public use. Another was to demand still fiercer immigration controls than the already tough ones brought in earlier in 2001. But the thoughtful answer - it was Fortuyn's, rapidly taken up by other parties, right or left - was to think how to make the country's Muslims more like “us”.

In Rotterdam, where the Fortuynists became the largest party on the city council, the resultant coalition made a priority of inburgering, the forming of citizens. Get more immigrant children into kindergarten, make sure they master the language, push them to stay longer at school and get better job skills. And act correspondingly for adults, newly arrived or long resident: encourage or shove them into citizenship courses, show them how ordinary Dutch society works and how it thinks.

Such notions can spring from and lead into racism. But it is hardly an act of hostility to make people improve their social or work skills; it happens to all schoolchildren. And to most of the native Dutch, this was simply a reasonable “when in Rome do as the Romans do”, and a recognition that this acculturation was not happening fast enough, but needed to be pushed.

This approach is now spreading fast. Indeed the Danes, a people very conscious of their immigrants, would say they pioneered it. They elected a Liberal (ie, free-market) government in late 2001, and a new ministry for “immigrants and integration” began not just fiercely shutting the doors but also pushing the integration that the previous government had merely talked about. The emphasis is on jobs: “Work is the key to integration.”

Both sticks and carrots are used. Welfare benefits for all the newly arrived have been cut - for their first seven years! - to well below the rates for most Danes. But they can now work part-time while drawing these. To help the process, the newcomer must sign up to compulsory courses in civics and language and, if need be, compulsory work placements. Fail to comply, and your stingy benefits will become even stingier. But extra money is going into integration, for example, to job counselling for immigrants and to educating foreign women brought in for marriage.

That is the theory, and these are early days. Already problems are plain. The government says what is to be done, but the local authorities have to do it, and don't find that easy. Tighter controls on bringing in a bride are unlikely to drive a young male immigrant into instant marriage with a blue-eyed blonde. Nor will a need for nine years of legal residence, plus other requirements, before he can be naturalised as a Dane help to make him feel like one.

That is the trouble: the clash between the widespread European feeling of “Let's have fewer of these people”, and being more welcoming to those already inside. Norway, which is following Denmark down the compulsory “induction” route, has less anti-immigrant feeling. But a new rule won by its most anti-immigrant (and, at this moment, most popular) party bars accepted asylum-seekers from bringing in family members unless they can support them. That will push some people to work, but it will hardly make them feel they belong - and it is not meant to.

Headscarves and cricket

Germany for years exemplified a rather different paradox. It welcomed its “guest-workers” as workers, but no way, least of all by easy naturalisation, did it try to integrate them. The newcomers naturally tended, and cheerfully were left, to stick in their national groups, socialising, shopping and praying with each other, reading their own newspapers - Turkey's Hurriyet has a flourishing German-printed edition - and more recently watching their own satellite-television programmes.

An immigration law was passed last year, aimed, among other things, at integration, with publicly financed courses in German language, history and other citizen-like knowledge. Compulsory courses? That was left unclear, as the law itself still is: for procedural reasons, not content, the Constitutional Court last December struck it down. It may yet be revived.

Britain, in contrast, though endlessly alarmed these days about asylum-seekers, has done startlingly little to integrate the millions of immigrants and their offspring, largely from its ex-empire, that it already has. And until recently, and still very largely, the British line has been to accept the resultant mosaic, cross one's fingers and hope: no compulsion here.

Though the state has been slow to finance Muslim schools in Britain (the Netherlands, in contrast, has more than 40 already), multiculturalism is still the rage. Many urban local councils put out documents in several languages. And visiting cricket teams from Pakistan or India win loud support from their ethnic cousins, though most of these are British-born and thereby British citizens; a phenomenon that irritated one of Margaret Thatcher's senior ministers, but worries few people in Britain and prompts fewer still to suggest any measures that might alter it. Only recently has an authoritarian home minister begun to think of forcing newcomers into British ways, and even he is thinking strictly of newcomers. The case of the Tel Aviv suicide bombers may yet promote fresh thinking; so far it has promoted only fresh security measures.

The French notion of integration, in contrast, is strictly that of the melting-pot, with the heat supplied by “republican values”, secularism not least. That noble ideal can produce tortured arguments over the right of Muslim schoolgirls to wear headscarves. But, worse, it led for years to official unreadiness to admit that there was a problem with, specifically, the large Arab and Muslim population, and one requiring active treatment.

Since the September 11th attacks, and amid rising alarm about Muslim terrorists, especially from Algeria, there has been much talk of the need for newcomers to accept French values, but little certainty of how to achieve it. The authorities have long been eager to see Islam “naturalised”, with imams trained in France rather than sent and paid for from abroad. France, a secular state by constitution, cannot finance religion. It has, however, been fairly generous in regularising the status of illegal immigrants: of 140,000 who applied when the left came to power in 1997, 80,000 were accepted. This gives some ammunition to the racist right, but it is surely a step towards integration.

This year has brought one more overt effort that way: the setting-up of a single national Islamic council to act as an interlocutor with the authorities. But will this in fact bring more integration - or less? The new body, which met for the first time on May 3rd, was elected in April by delegates from nearly 1,000 mosques. But are these the authentic voice of the Muslim community? The Archbishop of Paris, not alone, doubts it, arguing that most Muslims do not go to the mosque, and that “you can't reduce the issue of North African immigration” - much the largest - “to one of Islam”. What's certain is that the election gave a large voice to Muslim traditionalists and fundamentalists, and these were soon challenging the government over headscarves (in identity-card photos, this time). If such clashes occur often, the new council could be a factor against integration; and the interior minister's threat to deport imams who challenge republican values, which is not yet a crime in France, is no great way to teach those values.

Spain and Italy, parts of which centuries ago were actually ruled by Muslims from North Africa, are by northern standards surprisingly relaxed about their immigrant descendants. Spaniards are proud of the Christian Reconquista, but also of their Muslim heritage; they hear more about the dozens of Moroccans drowned trying to cross the straits of Gibraltar than about the thousands labouring in Andalusia's horticulture and elsewhere. Italians once had a historic phrase “Mamma, li Turchi!” - the Turks (ie, Muslims) are coming! But they are likelier these days to know a not-so-historic north-Italian joke, and it is not immigrants who are its target:”

Q: Why did Sicily win the Nobel peace prize?A: Because it was the only Arab country that didn't make war on Israel.”

Italian governments have often acted to legalise illegal workers: measures in 1990, 1995 and 1998 each gave papers to more than 200,000 people. Though one party in the Berlusconi coalition government is openly anti-immigrant, a fresh offer from that government last summer brought almost 700,000 applications. How many will succeed is unclear, given the slow start to the process and the doubts among Mr Berlusconi's governing partners, who see this as a means not of promoting integration but of sorting out who wants to work and who does not, and excluding the latter. The permits in any case will be valid only for a year, though renewable.

More recently, the home minister offered “dialogue” to Italy's moderate Muslims, aiming to isolate the extremists: a move mostly welcomed by Muslims, although the Archbishop of Turin stirred the pot by saying that the church should offer them the Gospel as well. But to Italians the problem with immigration is not so much one of alien values as of the arrival, with the Balkan immigrants, Muslim or not, of Mafia values. And acculturation is still, as ever, left to work largely by itself.

Citizenship and the vote

There is one obvious way of helping it along: citizenship, or at least the vote. Treat people as voteless foreigners, and why would they feel anything else? Let them vote, and maybe they will feel at home. In fact, this remedy may not be much of one. As Commonwealth citizens, most members of Britain's minorities, even those not formally British, can vote already. Anyone born in France (or most European countries) is a citizen automatically. In contrast, Germany until 1998 based citizenship on descent, not birthplace, and required 15 years of residence before an outsider could be naturalised; most of its ethnic Turks are still Turkish citizens. Yet as between France's Arabs, many of whom are French citizens, and Germany's Turks, it is the Arabs who feel, and are seen as, more alien.

Still, political rights must have some integrative value. EU countries already let each other's citizens vote in local elections. Now the EU's economic and social committee is arguing for “civic citizenship”, which would give long-term residents from outside equal local-voting rights - and indeed more valuable ones, such as equal access to education and jobs.

Whatever the method, one thing is sure: Europe needs active integration policies. It cannot just sit around and wait for time to sort things out. That has been tried. It has not brought disaster - but it could.

The real issue for European societies is not how to keep new foreigners out but how to integrate the minorities they already have.

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