If Europe is to
overcome Islamist terror, it needs to fight for the values it holds dear
For many on the
left, tolerance comes easily. But economic disarray has sapped the will to
defend our principles of rationalism and individual liberty
Paul Mason
The Guardian, Sunday 11 January 2015 / http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/11/europe-survive-islamist-terror-learn-to-fight-for-values-holds-dear
There’s a map of Europe
that was supposed to tell the main story. It shows the wealth created in every
region in the European Union, colour coded: yellow for poor, green for average
and purple for the rich areas that produce up to 125% more per head than the
average.
The result looks as if somebody took a
broad purple paintbrush, starting near Florence ,
and swiped upwards through the Alps, western Germany
and the Netherlands , running
out of paint a little around Denmark ,
but then colouring in most of Scandinavia .
The lifestyle in these rich regions is the
outcome Europe aspired to when it adopted
first the single market and then the euro. When the euro project was still
working, it was assumed that around this highly developed central bloc of
wealthy regions, crossing national borders, there might develop the paradigms
of a transnational European culture. Think the high-spec family car, the
regional opera house and the skiing holiday. It was, after all, along this
geographic corridor connecting Florence
The eurozone crisis put an end to this
conceit. But the current wave of revulsion against Islamist terrorism
challenges us to ask, urgently, what the common European culture actually is.
Austerity has drawn a horizontal line through the map of Europe ,
across which solidarity has not readily flowed. German unemployment this week
hit an all-time low of 6.5%, while youth unemployment in Italy Europe , it could
not have been better timed.
The news coverage showed the enormity of
the spontaneous demo at the Place de la République on the night of the murders.
But one participant told me, contrary to the instant myth-making about “unity”
among the crowd, that those on the plinth of the statue were openly divided
between secular leftists and liberals and populists of the Islamophobic right.
The latter leerily belted out the most embarrassing line of the Marseillaise –
“Let’s spill the blood of the impure” – to jeers from others. The atmosphere,
said my witness, “felt dangerous”.
The source of the danger is that, with the
economic project in disarray, the very concept of a unifying, liberal and
tolerant European culture is already under threat. With tens of thousands on
the streets of Dresden opposing “Islamisation”, and with Geert Wilders’ Freedom
party leading the polls in the Netherlands, for many – even in the wealthy
“purple” regions – defending European values has become a question of defending
white, smalltown, conservative Christian culture, and letting migrants drown in
the Mediterranean.
The mainstream parties of the centre have
been almost unanimous across Europe in their
response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre: dignified restraint, emphasis on the
multi-ethnic nature of society, refusal to link it to Islam and migration.
Which is fine, but like the rest of elite politics in Europe
right now, seems hollowed out in terms of emotion and principle.
The French left’s preference for
in-your-face secularism and scatologically offensive satire goes back to the
Jacobins, for whom the words “priest, bugger and fuck” were in the core
political vocabulary. It is a “French thing” that even their friends struggle
to understand. But as a cultural response it has the virtue of being strong. It
draws on a tradition 200 years old, that subjected Paris
But it’s a national tradition. Europe remains, for all the economic integration it has
achieved, a coalition of nations with national cultures. Indeed, we revel in
our differences: see how warily we intermingle in the summer cafes along the
Med, or on the ski slopes, always attuned to national quirks, cultures and
obsessions. So by hitting a Europe that is
culturally incoherent, and in the midst of economic stagnation, the Islamist
terror groups are hitting a smart target.
You would not have to spend much time
driving a pizza moped, as one of the Kouachi brothers did, to understand how
much the white, Christian people of Europe
currently blame each other for the economic crisis. Or how much of their
frustration is directed at migrants. The danger in Europe
is that the forces of cultural fragmentation coincide with those in economics.
The political elite’s economic credibility ebbs away with every month that GDP
or inflation falls below zero. For those who have already supported one round
of unsuccessful foreign wars in Muslim countries, there is no appetite to do it
all again.
The only common culture that will survive
the onslaught that IS and its allies are planning for Europe
has to be built on two principles: first, religious tolerance and respect for
migrants’ rights under international law; second, the aggressive pursuit of
secularism, rationalism and individual liberty. The liberal centre and the
European left have this weakness in common: they find the tolerance bit easier
than the aggressive fight for humanism and modernity. The collapse of the old
left’s economic project, and the current collapse of the economic project of
the centre, has sapped their will to fight for the culture they believe in.
Islamist terror cannot be stopped by the
security and intelligence services alone. It has to be fought culturally and
economically. But the only cultural response that is going to beat them is the
one that does not play their game. It has to be based on the core values of
European democracies – and this is true whether or not we like the eurozone or
even the EU as institutions. Those core values reach back to the Enlightenment
and the Renaissance; they are secular and humanist in action, even when carried
out by people who are devout Jews, Christians and Muslims.
Where to start? Eradicate the slums, remove
religious bigots from all educational contact with children and give kids
brought up in obscurantist faiths an education that insists the prejudices of their
parents may be mistaken. And find the young people jobs.
Paul Mason is economics editor of Channel 4
News.
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