Will Europe survive?

Apr 01, 2016

By Rand Richards Cooper
Looking over there these days, one wonders if we’re seeing not just widespread problems, but the failure of the European Union itself.

Like some marriages between people, that marriage of nations seems designed for success only: it works fine as long as things go well, but grievous flaws emerge under pressure. Two cataclysms have provided that pressure: the economic meltdown; and the refugee crisis spurred by catastrophe in the Arab world and inflamed – as we saw again last week — by ISIS terror. While the economic crisis can bewilder anyone, the second crisis is easy to grasp.

Take southeastern Europe’s porous gateway to strife-ravaged areas in the Levant, add the erasure of interior border controls wrought by the EU Schengen Agreement, plus the liberal asylum policies in prosperous Western European nations... and you get a tidal wave of desperate humanity, aimed at Europe. Complicating things, once those refugees arrive, is the hamfistedness many European countries have with multiculturalism, and the particularly vexing nature of the European-Muslim encounter.

The case of Germany is both emblematic and crucial. The Merkel government greeted the refugee influx with exceptional generosity, taking in an astonishing one million asylum seekers last year.

The backlash against Merkel’s policy came, first from other countries, especially the border countries of eastern Europe, which denounced the policy for creating incentives for more refugees. Then it came from within Germany itself, where anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim energies have exploded, sparked by the notorious events in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, when scores of German women were sexually assaulted and robbed by gangs of men of Arab origin in the public square by the train station.

This has created a deep sense of Germanness that excludes “foreigners,” even when they’re German. Across Europe, this ethnic concept of identity is clashing with a de facto diversity wrought by liberal immigration and refugee policies. Some are calling this phenomenon Eurabia, which is inflaming a nationalist reaction, in Germany and elsewhere.

Eurabia is, indeed, an alarming prospect that has fueled the refugee flood and ignited ISIS terror attacks. Fears of Eurabia rest on anxiety about the threat posed by Islam, an anxiety stoked by those who peddle dire theological warnings and lurid scenarios of capitulation and collapse.

Germany is a perfect example of what is unfolding today in the West. It all began in the 1960s with a mass immigration of Muslim Turks. Today, this has culminated in a roster of cultural and political insults to Germans — schools have been forced to ban pork, traditional Christian holidays celebrated by German children were eliminated, and created segregated swimming pools. Turkish children born and raised in Germany stay in Muslim/Turkish neighbourhoods and harbour resentment towards native Germans.

What will happen in Europe, not just this year, but over the next decade or two? Well, in Germany and elsewhere, the political and cultural contradictions wrought by the problem of assimilation has surfaced in hot-button topics, such as the hijab controversy in France, or the travails of second-generation Turkish workers in Germany or the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. But now, with the attacks in Belgium – or Belgistan, as one observer called it — underscoring the vulnerability of an open European society, these cultural contradictions pose what might be an existential crisis for Europe.

What a bizarre and ominous political moment this is in the West. Once again, Germany sits squarely at the centre of European destiny. “The European idea has not been this weak since the march to unity began in the 1950s,” writes New York Times columnist Roger Cohen. “If Merkel’s refugee gambit implodes, the reverberations will be felt everywhere.”

It’s hard not to shudder.--Commonweal (Edited)