Фрэнсис Фукуяма - Identity - The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

So while the elites talked of “ever-closer union” within the EU, the reality was that the ghosts of the older national identities hung around like unwanted guests at a dinner party. This was particularly true among older, less educated voters who could not or would not take advantage of the mobility offered by the new Europe. These ghosts started to emerge at critical junctures, where they have created an existential threat to the EU as a whole.

This was vividly illustrated by the crisis over the euro, in which the common currency, issued first in 1999, allowed Greece to borrow profligately during the boom years of the 2000s. The Germans, who were perfectly willing to support their less well-off fellow citizens with an expansive welfare state, were not inclined to be so generous with the Greeks when the latter threatened to default. Greece indeed had very different approaches to savings, debt, and practices such as public-sector patronage than did Germany. Berlin, as Greece’s chief creditor, was able to impose crushing austerity on Athens with help from international institutions such as the European Central Bank and the IMF, a situation that persists to the present. The euro crisis exposed a deep rift within the eurozone’s northern and southern members, who today are far more aware of their national differences than they were prior to the outbreak of the crisis.

But the more significant conflict emerged over the related questions of immigration and refugees. Levels of foreign-born residents began to rise dramatically in the 1990s and 2000s for a number of reasons. First, the guest workers from Muslim-majority countries such as Turkey, Pakistan, and Morocco did not return home as initially expected; rather, they brought their families, had children, and started to settle in to their adopted countries. The dramatic expansion of the EU following the end of the Cold War opened the gates to massive immigration from Eastern Europe to the west, just as economic theory suggested it might as workers sought job opportunities in richer countries.

Migration from Muslim countries was always more controversial in Europe than was migration from elsewhere in the EU. The reasons for this were complex. In some cases, it was the result of simple racism, xenophobia, and cultural prejudice. Others feared that the newcomers were not “fitting into” the host societies. Charges were made that immigrants and their children were living in self-enclosed neighborhoods and not learning the national language even after years of residence.

These fears became far more vivid after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, followed quickly by a string of similar al-Qaeda operations in London and Madrid. These incidents triggered bitter debates over national identity in many European countries, since the terrorists often came from within their own societies. This was particularly the case in the Netherlands, which has, proportionately, one of Europe’s highest levels of Muslim immigrants. The controversy was started when Pim Fortuyn, an openly gay politician, argued in favor of closing off Muslim immigration on the grounds that Muslims were intolerant of people such as himself and would not fit into Holland’s permissive culture. Fortuyn was assassinated outside a radio station in May 2002, not by a Muslim but by an animal rights activist. But in 2004, Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker, was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch citizen of Moroccan extraction who was enraged by one of van Gogh’s films that the killer felt was disrespectful of Islam.

A further wave of violence occurred in Europe following the establishment of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq in the wake of the Syrian civil war. These included the Charlie Hebdo incident in Paris in January 2015, the Bataclan attacks later that year that led to 130 deaths, the bombing of the Brussels airport in March 2016, and attacks making use of trucks to mow down pedestrians in Berlin, London, Nice, and New York City. A significant group of Muslims had been radicalized by the Syrian conflict, and by recruitment over the internet by radical preachers.

These attacks focused attention on citizenship and national identity precisely because so many of the attackers were citizens of the countries they attacked and second-generation children of immigrants. Many European countries, it became clear, were harboring growing populations of angry immigrants who were not being properly integrated into their host societies, a small number of whom indeed seemed to bear deep hatred for the values those societies espoused.

Earlier challenges to national identity did not seem so serious. Multiculturalism was born in some sense in Canada, where the French-speaking population in Quebec wanted the legal right to protect their language and education in a continent dominated by English speakers. The Meech Lake Accord, negotiated in 1987, would have amended Canada’s constitution to protect the province as a “distinct society.” It was controversial precisely because it constituted a form of unequal group recognition: French Canadians were to be given linguistic rights not enjoyed by English speakers. The accord was not approved, but Canadian federalism continues to protect Quebec’s special cultural rights by mandating the use of French by French speakers and immigrants.

Muslim immigrants tested the limits of multiculturalism in ways that the Quebec nationalists did not. The latter’s most extreme demands would have split Canada into two countries, but even a separation would not have represented a fundamental threat to democratic values, since an independent Quebec would have remained a high-quality liberal democratic state. The real impact of francophone cultural demands concerns Canada’s linguistic rules, which were at most an annoyance to English speakers who had to learn French and post bilingual signs.

The same was not necessarily true of some of the cultural beliefs and practices of Muslim communities. The most extreme cases were Muslims willing to commit terrorism against their fellow citizens. Overt violence crossed a clear threshold and would be intolerable in any society. Other practices were more complex. Many Muslim families arranged the marriages of their daughters, potentially contravening the rights of the young women to choose their own partners; some unlucky ones who disobeyed became the targets of honor killings. Many observant Muslims disapproved of homosexuality at a time when gay marriage was spreading like wildfire across Europe. Muslim groups, in the name of respect for culture, made demands to be treated differently: to be allowed to segregate women and girls, or to prohibit women from being treated by male doctors and nurses. And as a result of the bitter Israeli-Palestinian conflict, many Muslims displayed a kind of anti-Semitism that Europe had been vigilant in suppressing since the end of World War II.

The 2000s saw the emergence of an intense debate across Europe over citizenship, immigration, and national identity. Citizenship is a two-way street: it endows citizens with rights that are protected by the state, but it also enjoins duties on them, above all, the duty of loyalty to the country’s principles and laws. This was a particularly neuralgic issue due to the large welfare benefits of many European states: strong opposition arose to providing such benefits to immigrants who did not seem to accept the basic terms of the social contract. And some feared that Muslims, as opposed to earlier immigrant groups, might never properly assimilate into the countries’ cultures. Right-wing anti-immigrant parties such as the National Front in France, Denmark’s Danish People’s Party, and the Freedom Party in the Netherlands gained support and put pressure on mainstream parties to accommodate their demands.

As a result, many European countries began to rethink their citizenship laws, and therefore the grounds on which immigrants could become full members of their societies. The failure to assimilate immigrants was not a one-way street: many European democracies made citizenship hard to obtain. Citizenship can be granted at birth on the basis of jus soli or jus sanguinis, or it can be acquired after birth through naturalization. Under jus soli, anyone born on the country’s territory automatically became a citizen; under jus sanguinis, citizenship depends on descent. {6} The United States has always had a jus soli, but it was actualized for people of all races with passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Similar rules apply in countries such as Australia and Canada with relatively open attitudes toward immigration. {7}