According to a recent survey conducted by The French newspaper Le Monde, 56 percent of French citizens feel as though there is an “anti-white” racism developing in France. The survey found that France’s influx of immigrants from North Africa and elsewhere has allegedly left the white majority feeling threatened with a new phenomenon of “reverse racism.”
Of course, it’s not just the French. Over the past half century, most of Western Europe has experienced some cultural byproduct of immigration. Germany’s Turkish “Gastarbeiters” now number 3.5 million and continue to grow, and a 2010 study by a German think tank found that more than 30 percent of Germans believed their nation was “overrun by foreigners.” The Pakistani presence in Great Britain, having crossed 1.2 million, has infamously pushed for the practice of Islamic law within the sphere of their sub-communities, sparking uproar among British lawmakers and citizens alike.
So the problem is not immigration, but integration. Europeans blame Islamic immigrants for living in secluded enclaves, holding strong cultural ties to their home country and communicating only in their native language.
But although Islam seems to be the common denominator, it is not the religion itself that bothers Europeans, but the resulting lack of effort to adapt to a new environment. A “Global Views on Immigration” survey in 2011 found that Belgium and Great Britain held the most negative opinions on Muslim immigration, and also happened to foster the least integrated Islamic populations in Europe. To go a step further, a majority of Europeans agree that immigration has “placed too much pressure on public services” and accuse immigrants of taking advantage of their government welfare systems.
So how is Islam the indirect source of the problem? For one thing, it’s fundamentally political when compared to Western Christianity. Islamic schools of thought — stretching back to its founding in 622 A.D. — have functioned upon the existence of the “Ummah” — or Islamic “people group.” Thus for most Muslim communities in Europe, the interactions between oneself and God translate to a larger scale of societal order.
This is not to say that today’s Muslim segregation is a direct result of the immigrants’ conscious desire to maintain an “Ummah.” On the contrary, many of them are used to strictly secular governments such as that of modern Turkey. But as social scientists like Tocqueville have stated, the spread and practice of Islam relies so much on political order it would be nearly impossible for Islamic societies to fully thrive under secular rule.
But what, in theory, is the wrong with that? The United States is the pinnacle of the reformed, Western nation with millions of Muslim inhabitants that shows how integration does not necessarily mean a complete renunciation of faith. Yet as we have seen with France’s Burqa ban and Germany’s headscarf ban for teachers and civil servants, there is a staunch difference between the United States’ idea of “freedom of religion” and Europe’s political history of “freedom from religion.”
As stated in the First Amendment, the making of any law “respecting an establishment” or “impeding the free exercise” of religion in the United States is not only prohibited, but also one of the original actions that government was told specifically not to take.
Europe, on the other hand, is filled with governments that were constructed prior to the wave of Muslim immigration. As a result, the secular, nationalized constitutions like those of France and Germany reflect a formerly homogenous, secular citizenry that no longer exists. So while Islamic “immigration isolation” is not a threat to the American way of order, it is a threat to the European one.
Here we see how “reverse racism” is really a two-sided deal. While Islamic sub-communities threaten Europe’s understanding of a national identity, European governments do little to account for their presence. Because of this, Europe’s Muslims are caught in a loop of self-segregation, which means Europe’s natives gather in opposing unison. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated, the push toward multiculturalism has been an “utter failure,” and although semi-permanent solutions will continue to be offered, it is clear that for Europe the answer involves a change in faith, a change in government, and most likely, a change in both.
Denise Taylor’s column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at d.taylor@cavalierdaily.com.
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