| Across the Pond Darkely By Salil Tripathi
Europe’s “foreigner” discomfort.
Sitting
on the other side of the pond as you read these lines,
you might legitimately wonder about the rise of right
wing parties in Europe and the continent's growing unease
with immigrants, asylum seekers, with people who don't
look and feel like Europeans.
It wasn't supposed to be like that. After all, in a
few more years, the European Union will be expanding
dramatically, taking in 10 more countries from the former
Eastern Bloc, raising the number of member-states to
25. The Euro, the common currency of 12 of the 15 countries
that currently make up the Union, was received enthusiastically
at its January launch, and it has so far defied skeptics
who thought Europeans would find it hard to give up
their liras, marks, franc, and pesetas. Europe has also
maintained its prosperity, and although its economies
are growing sluggishly, they are growing. All of Europe
is supposed to be one; not a prisoner or a fortress,
but a confident continent balancing the power and influence
of the United States. Prosperous but generous, communitarian
and egalitarian.
And yet, in country after country, over the last two
years, right wing politicians with anti-foreigner, anti-immigrant,
anti-EU, anti-globalization agendas are becoming successful.
Indian software engineers getting jobs in Europe use
it as a stepping stone to America. The only Indian to
head a major British-owned bank left at least partly
due to cultural clash. And with the exception of Britain,
you won't find people of color in prominent positions,
except in sports, in most of Europe. It has been a brilliant
season for the European right. Some right wing parties
are now part of European governments; others have shamed
traditional politicians, and one of them was even assassinated.
In Norway and Denmark, conservative parties have made
major breakthroughs. In Austria, Jorg Haider, who has
questioned the historical accuracy of the Holocaust,
leads a party that's part of the ruling coalition. In
Belgium, in the northern city of Antwerp, hub of the
world's diamond trade, in which so many Gujarati traders
are active, a party called Vlams Blok has gained prominence.
Its leader has questioned the authenticity of Anne Frank's
diary. In France, Jean-Marie le Pen, who dislikes Jews
and Muslims in equal measure, stunned the electorate
by defeating French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, and
qualified to take on President Jacques Chirac in Presidential
elections, which Chirac duly won, but Le Pen succeeded
in winning 20% of popular vote. And in the Netherlands,
an animal rights activist assassinated Pim Fortuyn,
a quintessential Dutch politician. Fortuyn was a former
professor and had formed a party called Pim Fortuyn's
List, and wanted to keep Muslim immigrants out of the
Netherlands, because of their failure to assimilate
and for being intolerant of the liberal Dutch lifestyle,
which includes free access to drugs, freer sex, and
no taboo on homosexuality. And in Britain, where I live,
the British National Party won three seats (out of hundreds)
in local elections. These politicians have succeeded
because traditional politicians - both of the right
and the left - have spectacularly failed in addressing
the anxieties and concerns of Europe's working class.
Europe's workers are worried about their present, not
the future; they are worried that their jobs are going
away to the developing world (mainly East Asia, but
also, increasingly, to Eastern Europe, and parts of
Latin America). They fear that the rush of immigrants
entering their countries has turned into a tide. No
amount of sophisticated economic analysis, showing that
immigrants, in the end, benefit a society by creating
jobs, and by taking jobs nobody else would take, is
helping. The right wing has succeeded in understanding
the anxiety of those really affected by globalization
in the west - the poor and the unskilled.
For them globalization has raised questions, not eased
their life. They do not use cell phones and do not sit
in jets to travel around the world. They don't park
their money in eight accounts in three exotic currencies
in offshore havens. They don't have seven credit cards,
and they don't have passports that are voluminous. They
are bewildered by changes imposed upon them by Strasbourg
(the French town where the European parliament sits)
and Brussels (where the Commission is headquartered).
And they feel powerless to stand in the way of these
European MPs and bureaucrats, who take decisions to
open major markets. The globalizers don't bother about
how it might play in Peoria (in this case, Palermo);
they wouldn't, because they wouldn't be globalizers
otherwise. And as the workers feel anxious, the right
wing offers them the convenient target - asylum seekers
and refugees, who enter the countries, looking for a
safe haven or a job. They are, in the writer Jeremy
Harding's memorable phrase, Europe's uninvited.
For, although Europe has erased the borders for economics
and finance, the emotional and cultural borders remain.
At heart, European nations haven't grasped the idea
of people changing nationalities. You are what you were
born as. An Indian with a French passport will always
be seen as an Indian. This might seem preposterous;
after all, a German left wing politician has the French-sounding
name of La Fontaine, and a French politician is called
Strauss, a distinctly German name. Britain's Conservative
Party includes a leader with the Spanish-sounding name,
Portillo. But Italians cried foul a few years ago, when
the black daughter of an immigrant won the Miss Italy
pageant. Italians don't look black, a mayor complained.
European corporate world is no different: There is virtually
no person of color running any company of note in the
whole of Europe, which is in marked contrast with the
US's AOL Time Warner, Merrill Lynch or Avon, to cite
only three examples. European newspapers run banner
headline stories when a company hires a foreigner to
run it, or when its board of 20 white men decides to
include another white man, but this time Swedish, and
not a Swiss, like the rest of them. In the United States,
such discussions appear anachronistic - in a meritocratic
society, a company must deliver results, even if it
means it has to have as its CEO a person who does not
"appear" American, as if there's a particular way an
American is expected to look. This idea - of seeing
nationality in ethnic, or racial, terms - is a European
tradition that cuts across the countries. Take Germany:
A person living in Argentina can claim to have German
grandparents, on the strength of a fading birth certificate,
and he automatically gets German citizenship. In contrast,
a Turkish guest worker (as migrant labor is called in
Germany) may have lived in Dusseldorf for three decades
and have grandchildren, but even if those grandchildren
speak only German, they won't get German citizenship
easily. When German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder decided
to let in Indian software engineers to meet the predictable
shortfall in Germany's IT industry, a conservative politician
ran a successful campaign against it, saying Germany
needed children, not Indians (kinder statt Inder).
The governing philosophy of seeing nationality in ethnic
terms is one reason why Europeans think of partitions
as the solution to an intractable problem. If Serbs
and Muslims can't live together in a province, partition
it, creating purer ethnic enclave. (An American would
suggest the country open its borders for foreign investment,
so that the economy would grow and nobody would have
the time to think of ethnic distinctions, so busy they'd
be making money).
There is greater suspicion in Europe of people who look
different, who pray to different Gods, or eat different
food. So French town councils don't think twice before
they agree to restrict Muslim schoolgirls from wearing
the veil or a headscarf, because wearing such a scarf
would hurt their dignity. But they don't impose a similar
restriction on Christian schoolgirls wearing crosses.
Similarly, in Britain, a Christian can sue anyone for
committing blasphemy, that is, insulting the Christian
God. But in the late 1980s, Muslims could not use the
blasphemy law to sue Salman Rushdie, when he published
the controversial novel, "The Satanic Verses."
Of course, that was good - a society which bans a writer
like Rushdie, or, for that matter, any other writer,
is a poorer society. Few societies can reach the First
Amendment nirvana of the United States; and it is to
the credit of Britain, and other European societies,
which believed in Rushdie's right to free speech and
protected his right.
Britain is more integrated than many of its continental
neighbors in accepting people who look, feel and eat
different. But it has also bent over backwards, in the
other direction. As Britain has become more multicultural,
the politically correct disease of multiculturalism
has spread through its body politic, making certain
conversations and criticism of some communities difficult.
In an ideal multicultural world, everything is supposed
to be relative; there are no absolute standards. The
result is that pernicious practices of some communities
are often tolerated, to the detriment of the second
generation of immigrants, who may wish to cast aside
some of the feudal customs that are part of their culture.
One example is forced marriage, which is imposed on
some South Asian women by their parents, usually Muslim.
And it took time for the British government to get its
act together and take steps to curb that menace.
The United Kingdom itself is a collection of at least
four identities - English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh.
And these identities are played out in the open in soccer
games and in pubs. As Britain's international influence
has declined, and it has ceased to be a major world
power, and as immigrants succeed within their society,
some of the working class poor in Britain resent their
success. Two decades ago, it was impossible to find
any shop open after 5 pm in Britain, because in this
nation of shopkeepers, shopkeepers kept the same hours
as offices. Main streets were ghostly lanes after six.
It took Indian immigr-ants from Kenya and Uganda to
change that. They worked long hours and placed the customer
at the center of their business and prospered. Today,
their children are in cream, fee-paying private schools,
and they move to bigger houses, becoming objects of
envy. "Their culture is to keep working," runs the typical
complaint from the man who's resting his elbows at the
pub. "They're bloody foreigners."
Americans don't find such behavior by immigrants so
deplorable; in Europe it is often seen as un-European.
Why could that be so? My friend, the writer Robert Winder,
believes it is because the United States, which is probably
the most cosmopolitan culture in the world, comprises
of people who have left a part of the world because
they were dissatisfied with it, and came to America
to discover themselves, to make a better life for themselves
and their families, in pursuit of happiness. Sure, some
were economic refugees; but America welcomed them.
In Europe, such economic refugees are considered somehow
unworthy; as people who leave a wretched place to live
off "generous" welfare, spectacularly misunderstanding
the immigrants' desire to build a life for themselves,
and lead better lives than in the country they left
behind. Europe has mythologized political refugees,
and does accept, in large numbers, "genuine" political
asylum seekers, but turns up its nose when economic
refugees are mentioned. America, despite 9/11, remains
committed to letting people in. Americans, therefore,
are impatient for change; they are pragmatic, and when
they see a problem, they want to solve it. Europeans
would like to take it apart it and analyze it. Only
Europe could create Jacques Derrida; only in America
could Steve Jobs invent a fantastic PC in a garage.
The ocean that separates the two continents is often
dismissed as a pond, and indeed, there's much interaction
and investment. Cross-border investment between Europe
and the US, two-way, is massive. Major American brands
today are owned by Europeans; likewise, Americans own
major European icons. Yet, Europeans don't really get
it, they don't understand America. They seem to think
that Americans are nothing but Europeans who've intermarried
and speak English with a weird accent and wear cowboy
boots and bully the world. That's a flawed assumption;
but that assertion feeds itself, taking a life of its
own, perpetuating misunderstanding about America.
America works because it is impatient. If there's a
problem, solve it, and if you can solve it, the job
is yours; your accent is not a big deal. In Europe,
if you don't really fit in, you don't belong, and most
immigrants would inevitably have a problem there. An
American waitress will enthusiastically tell you whether
the day's special is worth having, and a better deal
might be the set menu; in Europe, the waiter will walk
around with his nose up in an expensive French restaurant,
and look down upon you when you order the wrong wine.
That's during the good times. In tougher times, the
immigrants are the first to be blamed. In Rotterdam,
the busy Dutch port city where Pim Fortuyn was successful,
it was assumed that the rise in crime could only have
come about because of an increase in immigrants. "Our
benefits are too generous," they'd say, failing to notice
that if they were generous they wouldn't turn to crime
in the first place. (Reality check: in the UK, supposedly
the most generous European country, the weekly benefit
for legal refugees is the princely sum of about $100;
the average rent for a flat in distant parts of outer
London goes for $220 a week).
Such resentment is just beneath the surface. And the
right wing parties are prompt to capitalize on it. Much
as the Hindu right in India has created the impression
that Muslims are exceptionally privileged in India,
and have more rights than Hindus and are therefore better
off than other Indians, the European right has played
on the anxieties of the majority white community, and
shown them the poor, vulnerable immigrant as the target
for their venom. Keep him out, everything will be fine,
they seem to think.
The refugee, the immigrant, the asylum seeker, the economic
migrant, therefore, is kept at the border. His identity
doesn't mesh easily with the purer European identity.
It is not acculturated in the music of Mozart, in the
art of Rembrandt, in the drama of Ibsen, in the language
of Shakespeare, in the sculpture of Rodin.
And to keep him out, some Europeans are, alas, turning
to the language of other Europeans, like Hitler and
Goebbles, of Mussolini and Enoch Powell, and fear that
unless the immigrants are kept out, there will be rivers
of blood in Europe.
That's a huge simplification, of course. Europe has
learnt from the two World Wars, and Europe of 2002 can't
be compared with Germany or Italy of 1930s. At the same
time, resentment simmers beneath the surface. The attacks
on Sept 11, after all, targeted America - and yet, it
was in Europe that people of color were attacked, and
in retaliation, some synagogues were assaulted. And
yet again, Europe's Left concluded that the attacks
on Sept 11 were somehow America's fault. The logic linking
these arguments is bafflingly complex; it is the kind
of thing one should ask Derrida to explain. There is,
though, a simpler explanation: many Europeans feel they
are forced to change their identity - economic, political,
and cultural - and they are not longer in control of
themselves. And being Europeans, they'd rather analyze
it, instead of changing the world around them. That's
the major difference between the two land masses on
either side of that pond called Atlantic Ocean.
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