The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe Rita Chin Review
Nonfiction
How the New Immigration Is Shaking Onetime Europe to Its Core
THE Crisis OF MULTICULTURALISM IN EUROPE
A History
By Rita Mentum
363 pp. Princeton University Press. $35.
THE STRANGE DEATH OF EUROPE
Clearing, Identity, Islam
By Douglas Murray
343 pp. Bloomsbury. $26
In the mid-1890s, the German sociologist Max Weber warned against "the continual swarm" of cheap Polish laborers arriving in Germany. According to him, a "free market policy, including open borders in the east, is the worst possible policy at this betoken." And not just for economical reasons. The likely integration of these aliens would threaten the "social unification of the nation, which has been carve up apart by mod economical development." For Weber, a German nationalist, the "influx of Poles" was "far more dangerous from a cultural viewpoint" than even of Chinese "coolies."
Compared with Weber's rhetoric well-nigh Germany'south "struggle for existence" and his strictures confronting Catholics and Jews as well as Poles and Chinese, there is cipher overtly racist about the denunciations Rita Mentum quotes in "The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe" by opponents of multiculturalism — which for them is shorthand for the nonwhite laborers Europe expediently imported later on World War II to reconstruct its shattered economy. The political scientist Samuel Huntington's comment that "multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilisation" — approvingly cited past Douglas Murray in "The Strange Death of Europe" — likewise seems coded in comparison. But as demagogues across Europe and America rant against immigration and promise to build a stiff and unified national community through exclusion, it is difficult not to experience déjà vu.
Racial nationalism was commonplace in the late 19th century, the radically confusing starting time phase of economical globalization. Hierarchies of race, ethnicity and religion were imposed on non-Western peoples as Europeans scrambled for territories and resource abroad, followed enviously by Americans. Exclusion was as well cardinal to their frantic effort to build political communities at home. Old bonds and solidarities had frayed in societies split apart, equally Weber wrote, by modern economic evolution. Many of the aggrieved became eager to recreate and purify the social trunk, and to preserve "our" identity against people stigmatized equally the "other" through their names, pare colour or religious practices. Mass immigration to Western Europe and America, which peaked in the late 19th century, heightened the fantasy of a lost communal wholeness. So did unregulated flows of refugees: Pogroms in Russia sent thousands of Jewish survivors to Western Europe. (Weber's warnings against the Polish "swarm" reflected a and then widespread anxiety most Ostjuden.)
Virulent anti-Semites flourished in Austria-Hungary, Germany and French republic equally the 19th century ended, while lynchings of blacks past white mobs in the United states became more mutual. The United states of america in the 1880s had pioneered racialized clearing policy, passing laws aimed at keeping Asians out. The Jim Crow laws that institutionalized segregation in the 1890s were accompanied past a mass hysteria in the Usa against immigrants. Fears of degeneration haunted fifty-fifty powerful white men like Theodore Roosevelt. In 1905, amongst widespread paranoia about the Yellow Peril, he warned of "race suicide," exhorting white people to strengthen themselves confronting their rising nonwhite rivals.
History repeats itself equally unfunny farce when, a century afterwards Roosevelt, another macho president amplifies white fears of losing out in the struggle for existence. "The primal question of our time," Donald J. Trump asserted in Warsaw in July, "is whether the West has the will to survive." Indeed, the fright of refuse has intensified every bit globalization appears to enfeeble in one case mighty Western nation-states while empowering those previously stigmatized as the Yellow Peril. Equally in the late 19th century, demagogues displace the anxieties of powerless people onto a conspicuously identifiable social group: immigrants or refugees. The mechanism of scapegoating — catalyzing mass disaffection and providing information technology with a unproblematic culprit — has gone into overdrive in Europe and America equally crunch besets the second phase of globalization.
In his surprisingly literate screed, the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik called his land the "most suicidal" in Europe for accommodating nonwhite minorities. The first sentence of Douglas Murray'southward book, a handy assimilate of far-right clichés, claims that all of Europe "is committing suicide." Like his numerous precursors, ranging from Max Nordau, the author of the pop "Degeneration" (1892), to Breivik, Murray goes on to depict Europeans every bit culturally and spiritually debauched. Plainly, they are not only helpless before the hordes of virile foreigners rampaging through their continent, simply too keenly complicit in their own destruction.
"Only modern Europeans," Murray writes, "are happy to exist self-loathing in an international marketplace of sadists." Information technology is never quite clear which European masochists Murray, an associate editor of The Spectator in Britain, is talking about. A majority of his ain countrymen, as a recent poll revealed, are proud of their onetime empire, and ane might even debate that a xenophobic fantasy to regain imperial glory and ability fueled Great britain's determination to leave the European Matrimony last year. What is more, Murray does non seem wholly relieved, like most of us, that the vast bulk of Germans regret their country's Nazi past, and are determined non to repeat it. He offers a stalwart defence of the thuggish outfit Pegida (People Against the Islamization of the Occident/West) confronting criticism past German politicians and journalists; he claims that the English language Defence League (a gang of hooligans shunned by its ain founders for its "far-right extremism") "had a point." More disturbingly, he rates Hungary's prime government minister, Viktor Orban, a self-declared fan of disciplinarian democracy, as a better sentinel of "European values" than George Soros.
Needless to say, Murray's threnody for Europe is as fundamentally breathless as its late-19th-century originals. It never strikes him, or other secondhand vendors of fixed and singular identities, that nowhere in the earth have individuals been the exclusive heirs of a single culture or civilization. Europe also as America has been a melting pot of diverse influences: Western farsi, Arab and Chinese, in improver to Greek, Roman, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon. As the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, a horrified witness to Europe'due south suicidal nationalism in the early 20th century, once wrote: "In human beings differences are not like the physical barriers of mountains, stock-still forever — they are fluid with life'south flow, they are irresolute their courses and their shapes and their volumes," in what is a "world-game of infinite permutations and combinations."
Murray's retro claims of ethnic-religious customs, and fears of contamination, telephone call for close assay. Their toxic furnishings, which have been amply verified past history, make information technology imperative to explore the deeper sources of gimmicky anxieties: political, social and economic upheavals. And this is what Rita Chin'south volume does, synthesizing the endless debates over multiculturalism into a bright picture of postwar Europe. Lucidly written and resourcefully argued, information technology is a superb example of a scholarly intervention in a public debate dominated by unexamined prejudice.
Mentum'southward parents were ethnic Chinese forced to exit Malaysia subsequently the end of British dominion and to movement through many "dissimilar cultural worlds as students, employees, colleagues, neighbors, friends and in-laws." She wishes her reader to understand the multiple and perennially shifting identities of immigrants "in a earth where much of the political discourse is quick to demonize them as groups." Appropriately, she declines to accept identities — British, German or European — equally unalterable essences. Rather, she explores the specific ideas that many in post-1945 British, French, Dutch and High german societies take used to analyze their identity; and she never ceases to historicize what to a tub-thumper similar Murray seems self-evident.
The very notion of Europe, for instance, began to sally out of European encounters with Muslim populations during the Crusades. European cocky-consciousness was then sharply demarcated in remote trading posts and colonies vis-à-vis subjugated and supposedly racially inferior peoples. Just, every bit Chin writes, the "reversal of migratory patterns" subsequently Globe War Ii "shifted the process of European self-definition in a dramatic way": "Instead of Europeans moving outward into the world as they had washed for hundreds of years, people from effectually the world began to settle in Europe, filling the demand for labor created by wartime devastation."
For Chin, an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan, this is the crux of the problem: "In the by, groups perceived as incompatible with European identity were usually located beyond European borders. But now they are firmly established inside Europe itself." In the 19th century, nation-states premised on homogeneous populations needed foreign lands and resource in order to expand; and they had the creature power necessary to enforce hierarchies of race, class and education that kept the "natives" in their identify. This supremacy has been progressively weakened, start past the urgencies of postwar reconstruction, then past the accelerated flows of technologies, goods and capital in contempo decades of globalization.
Chin pays little attention to the socioeconomic traumas that have led to an acute obsession with immigration: deindustrialization, the shrinking of the welfare state, the fragmentation of working classes and the ascension of extreme inequality. Nor does she become into a pre-1945 history of clearing in Europe, and the projection of internal issues on to various "outsiders" — Jewish, Italian, Portuguese, Irish, Shine. Only she is consistently acute on how European elites since 1945 take reacted to the darker-skinned strangers in their midst, ignoring, misrepresenting and marginalizing them at offset, and and then turning them into a trouble, often broadly identified equally "multiculturalism."
Multiculturalism, in Chin'south account, appears largely to exist a problem for people who have long been accustomed to an identity congenital on domination and exclusion, and are panicked by its slow crumbling. Certainly, immigration was non a problem foisted on Europe from the exterior; the fates of Europeans and non-Europeans were inextricably connected in the 19th century past conquest, colonization and trade. Yet historical amnesia played an outsize function in dealing with nonwhite workers who were never expected to stay in Europe, permit lonely integrate or digest. Chin describes how people from the Caribbean who began to get in in United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland after 1948, for example, were seen as "colored immigrants" when in fact they were British citizens. An unreconstructed racism (exemplified past the commonplace sign "no dogs, no blacks, no Irish") remained for many years the bloodcurdling fate of people who had shaped, similar millions of toiling workers and peasants in the imperial provinces, the privileged destiny of the rich in the metropolitan centre.
A backfire against multiculturalism began to gather force subsequently the economic crises of the 1970s. The controversy over Salman Rushdie'south "The Satanic Verses" accelerated it. Black people had long been seen every bit culturally predisposed to criminal offence and hooliganism. But afterward the Ayatollah Khomeini, wrongly identified by the uninformed equally the sole representative of more than one billion Muslims, issued his fatwa confronting Rushdie, Islam began to seem incompatible with "Western values" too. Diversity has come to seem unworkable to many as the unequal world made by imperialism unravels, and Europe suffers terrorist attacks, economic crises and huge influxes of refugees from the countries it once brusquely made and remade in Asia and Africa. Chin vigorously tackles the "shared presumption," recklessly echoed by even mainstream politicians in Uk, France and Germany, that multiculturalism is a failure. "Declaring multiculturalism 'expressionless,'" Chin argues, "is a fashion of white Britons, Germans and French telling immigrants, 'We don't recognize y'all; you lot aren't a part of our society.'"
Surely, the many populations that now exist in every part of Europe cannot be homogenized, except through the savage ethnic cleansing skilful in almost every European state in the first half of the 20th century. In any case, as Mentum asks, "what exactly do Europeans imagine as a replacement for multiculturalism? How will they come to terms with multiethnic variety moving frontward?" Chin offers no simple answers, but her questions accept never seemed more urgent as Europeans (and Americans) seem to move forward to their grim past.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/books/review/crisis-of-multiculturalism-in-europe-rita-chin-immigration.html
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