GIVING UNICULTURALISM A BAD NAME :

The Ugly Europeans : Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jörg Haider, and other xenophobes. (Chris Suellentrop, April 26, 2002, Slate)

Much of what the Ugly Europeans propose isn't out of the mainstream of American political debate: Get tough on crime, promote Christian family values, reform the welfare state, curtail immigration. But the Ugly Europeans' policy inclinations on all those issues stem not from political ideology but from prejudice. How to get tough on crime? Get rid of the Muslim immigrants who are causing it. Why reform the welfare state? Because the Muslims are sucking us dry. Why promote Christian values? Because the Muslim invaders threaten to drown out our faith. Why curtail immigration? Because Muslims cannot assimilate into Western European cultures.

The Ugly European viewpoint stems from an exclusionary ethnocentric nationalism, summed up by Le Pen's slogan "France for the French," Haider's slogan "Austria for the Austrians," and Vlaams Blok's slogan "Our Own People First." Muslims from North Africa cannot assimilate even if they want to. Pia Kjaersgaard, the housewife leader of the Danish People's Party, wants the Muslims in Denmark to "go home": "They must not be allowed to integrate into Danish society." Filip Dewinter of Belgium's Vlaams Blok agrees: "We must stop the Islamic invasion," he told the New York Times Magazine. "I think it's, in fact, impossible to assimilate in our country if you are of Islamic belief." During a protest of a plan to open a center for foreign asylum-seekers in his hometown of Antwerp, Dewinter proclaimed, "Antwerp is not a garbage can." In an effort to prevent Muslim (and perhaps Jewish) assimilation in France, the mayor of Marignane, who is a member of Le Pen's National Front, eliminated the option for a non-pork lunch when pork was on the menu at public school cafeterias. The clear message: We don't want your children to eat with our children.

Ugly Europeans are adamantly opposed to multicultural, multiethnic societies, and they employ a neat rhetorical trick: framing their racist anti-Muslim sentiment as a defense of the multicultural value of diversity--a way to protect their own national culture, which they see as threatened. (The Netherlands' Fortuyn, in a similar bit of ideological gymnastics, justifies his intolerance for Muslims by saying that Muslims threaten the Netherlands' vaunted reputation for tolerance.) They're fiercely opposed to the European Union, which they see as leveling the distinctions among the Continent's distinct nations. And most assail America for its globalizing culture and its multiethnic society.

In this, ironically, the Ugly Europeans share more than a little in common with the Islamic extremism that has propelled them to new heights of popularity. They may not be terrorists and murderers, but their separatist agenda is familiar: a belief that Christians and Muslims cannot commingle; that the infidel invaders must be expelled to ensure their countries' self-preservation; and a backward-looking celebration of an empire long, long gone.

Though much better than many of the recent commentaries on the Le Pen phenomenon, Mr. Suellentrop gets a tad confused here. On the one hand he's suggesting that the problem with these xenophobic parties is that they don't want to integrate Muslims into their own Western European cultures. On the other, he's saying that their problem is that they are separatists. Well, multiculturalism is separatism. Go look around a college campus--where the multicultural ream has been most fully realized--and you'll see a society that has thoroughly stratified along ethnic/racial/religious lines, with separate dining halls and tables for Muslims, vegans, Orthodox Jews, blacks, etc.. It seems like we can have one or the other--integration into our culture or multiculturalism--but not both.

Mr. Suellentrop compounds his problem when he notes that the separatism that these parties espouse is similar to the separatism that defines Islamic culture today. If accurate, and I think it may be, this Islamic separatism would tend to make it extremely difficult (though hopefully not impossible) to integrate Muslims fully into Western culture and would tend to give credence to Le Pen's argument. And if Western elites continue to champion multiculturalism it may, at some point, become necessary for those of us who believe in Western culture to vindicate it, even within Western nations.

Assimilation isn't a one way street, imposing on natives the obligation to try to assimilate immigrants, but placing no burden upon the new-comer to try to conform to the new culture he's chosen. It seems fair enough to ask that those who wish to benefit from our culture in turn adopt it as their own.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 29, 2002 8:32 AM