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The
End of the Multiculturalist Consensus in Europe
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Excerpt
In 2009, the American journalist Christopher Caldwell famously characterized
the changes that a massive non-European, non-Judeo-Christian, immigration
was forcing over Europe as a "revolution." We may now be on the
brink of a counter-revolution, and that can be as violent and
far-reaching as revolution itself.
Last year's massacres in Paris (the attacks on satirical cartoonists
and a kosher supermarket's customers in January 2015, then the November
13 killing spree) were a tipping point : the French – and by extension,
most Europeans — realized that unchecked immigration could lead to civil war.
Then there was the Christmas crisis in Corsica, a French island in the
Mediterranean. On December 24, a fire was activated at an
immigrant-populated neighborhood in Ajaccio, the capital of Southern
Corsica. As soon as the firemen arrived, they were attacked by local
youths, Muslims of North African descent. Such ambushes have been part of
French life for years. This time, however, the ethnic Corsicans
retaliated; for four days, they rampaged through the Muslim
neighborhoods, shouting Arabi Fora! (Get the Arabs out, in
Corsican). One of Ajaccio's five mosques was vandalized.
Then, there was the New Year's crisis in Germany and other Northern
European countries. On December 31, one to two thousand male Muslim
immigrants and refugees swarmed the Banhofvorplatz in Cologne, a piazza
located between the railway Central Station and the city's iconic
medieval cathedral. As it turned out during later in the evening and the
night, they intended to "have fun": to hunt, harass, or molest
the "immodest" and presumably "easy" German women and
girls who celebrated New Year's Eve at the restaurants and bars nearby,
or to steal their money. 766 complaints were lodged. Similar incidents
took place in other German cities, like Hamburg, Frankfurt and Stuttgart,
as well as in Stockholm and Kalmar in Sweden, and Helsinki in Finland.
European public opinion is now
awaking to a very different view of immigration.
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Here again, the local population reacted forcefully. Support for
asylum seekers from the Middle East plummeted – 37 percent of Germans
said that their view of them has "worsened," and 62 percent
said that there are "too many of them." The Far Right
demonstrated against immigration in many cities, but liberal-minded
citizens were no less categorical. Le Monde, the French liberal
newspaper, on January 20 quoted Cologne victims as saying, "Since
1945, we Germans have been scared to be charged with racism. Well, the
blackmail is over by now."
Indeed, postwar Europe, and Germany in particular, had been built upon
the rejection of Hitler's mad regime and everything it stood for.
Nationalism, militarism, authoritarianism, and racism were out.
Multinationalism, pacifism, hyperdemocracy, and multiculturalism were in.
This simple, almost Manichean, logic is collapsing now – under the
pressure of hard facts. Or rather the Europeans now understand that it
was flawed in many ways from the very beginning, especially when it came
to multiculturalism, the alleged antidote to racism.
What Europeans had in mind when they rejected racism in 1945 was
essentially antisemitism. Today, the "correct" antiracist
attitude would be to welcome non-European immigrants en masse and to
allow them to keep their culture and their way of life, even it that
would contradict basic European values. Hence last summer's
"migrants frenzy," when the EU leadership in Brussels and major
EU countries, including Angela Merkel's Germany, decided to take in
several millions of Middle East refugees overnight.
European public opinion is now awaking to a very different view. And
the political class realizes that it must adjust – or be swept away.
The Schengen regime – which allows free travel from one country to the
other in most of the EU area – is being quietly suspended; every
government in Europe is bringing back borders controls. The French
socialist president François Hollande is now intent to strip disloyal
immigrants and dual citizens of their French citizenship (a move that
precipitated the resignation, on January 27, of his super-left-wing
justice minister, Christiane Taubira). He is also hiring new personnel
for the police and the army and even considering raising a citizens'
militia. Merkel now says that immigrants or refugees who do not abide by
the law will be deported. Even Sweden, currently ruled by one of Europe's
most left-wing cabinets, has been tightening its very liberal laws on
immigration and asylum.
Most Europeans agree with such steps. And wait for even more drastic
measures.
Michel Gurfinkiel, a
Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum, is the founder and
president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think
tank in France.
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