The End of Tolerance

The world has long looked upon the Dutch as the very model of modern, multicultural society. Open and liberal, the tiny seagoing nation that invented the globalized economy in the 1600s prided itself on a history of taking in all comers, be they Indonesians or Turkish, African or Chinese.

How different things look today. Dutch borders have been virtually shut. New immigration is down to a trickle. The great cosmopolitan port city of Rotterdam just published a code of conduct requiring Dutch be spoken in public. Parliament recently legislated a countrywide ban on wearing the burqa in public.

What’s going on here? Weren’t the Dutch supposed to be the nicest people on earth, the most tolerant nation in Europe, a melting pot for minorities and immigrants since the Renaissance? No longer, and in this the Dutch are once again at the forefront of changes in Europe. This time, the Dutch model for Europe is one of multiculturalism besieged, if not plain defunct.

Denmark’s Minister of Cultural Affairs said, “We have gone to war against the multicultural ideology that says that everything is equally valid”. These days he speaks for most Europeans. Danes, and Dutch, and a few other countries might be well on their way to creating multiethnic societies. But make no mistake: they are no longer willing to tolerate a European melting pot – a broadly multicultural society – where different cultures live by widely different norms.

What that portends for Europe is emerging in fits and starts. The common ground is a realization that past models of integration have failed. French Interior Minister said, “The French way of integration no longer works”, meaning France’s long-held pretense that its strict public secularism could erase differences and make newcomers “French”. Thus the Minister unveiled a new immigration law, a virtual copy of Dutch regulations. He plans to introduce highly selective immigration, testing for the “assimilability” of those it admits. A new “contract of welcome and integration” stipulates learning French and looking for a job in return for 10-year residence permits and discrimination protections. Immigrants failing to respect basic Western values face deportation.

In particular, Europeans are concerned about Islamist hostile to Western values and the very idea of integration itself. Dutch Integration Minister, one of several top politicians under death threats from Islamists, plans courses for imams to train in citizenship and Western values.

Will such measures advance the ultimate goal of building a “Euro Islam” more compatible with Europe’s values? Unlikely, perhaps, as long as only 5% of the imams in Europe’s 6,000 mosques are educated in Europe. After decades of neglect, Germany and France have finally set up a small number of Islamic departments at public universities to turn out locally acculturated preachers.

But if Europeans aim to build multiethnic societies that play by their rules, they’ll also have to get their head around the fact that this new world will be multireligious, too – a fact that poses awkward challenges. Over much of Europe, for example, established Christian churches enjoy special state privileges and subsidies. Most mosques, by contrast, are hidden in converted shops or tenement apartments.

Until such double standards can be abolished and a new equality established, Europe’s new toughness will feel like forced integration. “It’s a form of creating a second-class citizenship”, says Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship in Bristol. “All the burden of change is placed on the immigrant.”

It’s also clear that if Europeans want their immigrants to behave like Europeans, then they must be willing to accept them as Europeans, too. That’s where many societies that long thought of themselves as culturally homogenous have problems. But given the immigrant and demographic trajectories of Europe’s future, there is little choice but to try.

Source: Newsweek, March 2006

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Notes

burqa – Moslem female kerchief