Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [353]
There is little prospect either of a confident political identity at the European federal level as long as voters in major states regard the undemocratic nature of such a project with deserved scepticism, while national leaders are divided as to whether to extend the project eastwards or southwards. Intra-European political wrangling largely instigated by Germany has seen off Nicolas Sarkozy’s imaginative plan to offer North Africa and Israel associate status. Nor are countries which are themselves mostly federal, composite mini-empires going to have success in re-establishing core national identities, especially since the entire thrust of fashionable academic opinion is that the nation state is a mere ideological ‘construct’ that is in any case being superseded by Bobbitt’s wretched ‘market state’. When the British government essayed identity-building, the Scots and Welsh immediately protested their separate identities. Much the same has happened, or might do so, in Belgium, Italy or Spain should anyone push the matter, all of them states facing powerful separatisms. Likewise—and Britain may or may not be a uniquely vulgarised place—one does not notice contemporary politicians speaking up for the culture of Bach and Rubens rather than the Arctic Monkeys or the Killers, whom they believe they must favour if they are to pursue the talismanic ‘yoof’ vote.40
Judging by the amount of restiveness indigenous peoples (and one includes Chinese, African, Afro-Caribbean, Hindu and Sikh immigrants in that description) are expressing in the face of the incremental demands of assertive Islamists, it will be a rash politician who fails to accommodate such sentiments in making policy before some cataclysmic terrorist event forces a more knee-jerk reaction.41 The Prodi government’s failure to tackle the twin issues of crime and immigration has already led to the re-election of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, and a cabinet heavy with Northern League separatists and post-Fascists. We are likely to sound more Australian in future; in other words, politicians of all party persuasions will seem to present a united front in making it clear that there are lines in the sand, regarding the liberal democratic nature of our societies, which are not going to be crossed.42 Liberal Protestant clerics seem to provoke the loudest popular responses. It was made abundantly clear to the Dutch bishop Tiny Muskens when he suggested renaming God ‘Allah’ and to Rowan Williams with his donnish enthusiasm for licensing sharia law in Britain that these were steps too far. There are further straws in the wind.
Across Europe, conservative parties have found an anodyne way of talking about immigration as ‘population movements’ in order to neuter charges of racism. But such charges no longer have the debate-silencing effect they had even a decade ago, especially since it is older immigrants who often lead the way in calling for restrictions against uncouth newcomers. The fact that many recent migrants have been white Catholic Poles and other east Europeans has also helped defuse the issue of colour-obsessed racism. The people disproportionately responsible, it is alleged, for crime in Italy are Albanians or Romanians; the 800,000 children whose non-existent or poor English strains the British school system are largely east European. Borders will be policed by dedicated policemen—whose charms Yankees will shortly encounter when they debouch at Fiumicino, Schiphol or, heaven help them, Gatwick or Heathrow. There will also be more efforts to insist that immigrants have a mastery of the relevant local language, just as there will be a more graduated, extended process of achieving citizenship after fulfilling various reciprocal requirements. In other words citizenship