A Stranger in the Village: Immigration in the New Europe

by Paul Grant

If tolerance and hospitality are all that is requested, one will never know if tolerance and hospitality are the only gifts offered.

Hundreds of French girls were recently on the march, protesting a new dress code in the public school system. The Muslim head-covering (the "veil", as it is called in France) had been banned in schools. The French are struggling, as are nearly all European societies, over the relationship between immigrants and national identity.

The French revolution over two centuries ago was meant in part to de-establish the church. No longer would it be possible to refuse civil rights to a citizen on religious grounds. The background for disestablishment was the vicious oppression of the Huguenots, the French Protestants, in the 1500s and 1600s, which produced over 200,000 emigrants to Britain, Germany and America. More recently burnt into the corporate memory was Nazi Germany's holocaust of millions of European Jews. The revolutionaries of 1789 were in part attempting to guard against such crimes. The French thus established a form of public secularism, which has with time become a cherished plank in French identity. Since religious identity can easily be used for violence and oppression, goes the reasoning, creating a safely secular space is crucial for democracy's very survival.

But official secularism has always been pleasantly negative: It has liberated people from having to practice a faith. People in the French republic have never been forced to be baptized. Muslim immigrants have never had to convert. State secularism has rarely had a positive counterpart - freeing people to practice their faith. Such a protection was unnecessary. Faith was a private matter (most French remained devoutly Catholic long after the revolution), and the new French tradition of public secularism was meant to ensure that private faith was not intruded-upon.

Enter the Muslim immigrants. There are six million Muslims in France, and most are foreign-born. They are Arabs, Turks, Iranians, and people from all over Africa. They often live in large ghettos in big cities, and often have little or no contact with the outside world. All immigrants make compromises in their identity, as they struggle to adjust to their new worlds. First generation North African immigrants in France rarely see Islam as their primary identity; their ethnicity is more significant in their lives.

Their children, however, born in France and fluent in French, are increasingly pursuing Islam as the center for their self-understanding. As their memory of the old country fades, these young people remain sidelined in a society that will not meet them half-way. They have found Islam to be an important solution. Many schoolgirls thus wear the "veil" in the absence of family pressure. Many girls are the only females in their households covering their heads. The veil - and Islam in general - is important for the girls' mental survival in a society that insists on "tolerance" of foreigners (rather than full integration into society).

But showing up at school with a head-scarf is a different matter, at least to the authorities. The school is an organ of the secular state, and religion is not supposed to be present. It is no mere matter of religious pluralism, say the politicians. Bringing religion into the state is making a claim of individual liberty over and against social liberty. It is an invasion of public space (defined negatively by what it does not include) by the private. If the private prevails, the very foundations of the public protection of private liberties are imperiled. In other words, the very core of the democratic republic is at stake.

So the French parliament recently jumped to the protection of secular public space, enacting a national ban on Muslim head coverings in the public schools. To mask the law's focus on Muslim immigrants, wording was included banning large crosses around students' necks. The inclusion of Christian symbolism fooled nobody, and Muslim immigrants took to the streets in protest.

All of which looks easier from the Western shores of the Atlantic. In North America, nearly all of us are immigrants from somewhere else, or at least their descendents. Whether we're Asian, White or Black, our stories involve coming from "there" to make a new life "here". We argue about the details, such as the depth of "assimilation" society should demand of its newest members, but rarely to we question the immigrants' children's status as Americans or Canadians.

In France, Germany, Belgium and other European countries on the other hand, most people could be called indigenous. They speak languages considered local, and their family roots go back to before historical documentation. National identity is considered intrinsic to the very soil itself. This identification includes multiple layers, from family, to dialect, to government, to vocation. Europe has not had large-scale immigration for hundreds of years. As the continent's population and prosperity grew in the 1500s and 1600s, Europe (especially Spain, England and France) became net exporters of people and power. Europe amassed much of its prosperity through colonial-era networks that left the villages and countryside unexposed to people from other countries. As recently as 1955, James Baldwin could write from a remote Swiss village that he was the first Black man the locals had ever seen. (Baldwin's essay lent its title to this article.)

So when immigrants started arriving from the erstwhile colonies in the 1970s, good-natured hospitality was in order. After all, these people were poor and in dire straits. They were given tools and training to survive in their new societies. This is crucial: They were merely tolerated. There was no question of their becoming Germans or French. That is because rigid ethnic boundaries co-existed alongside fluid civil democracy. According to this way of thinking, one can change citizenship as easily as pie, but one can't change one's ethnicity.

Tolerance implies a dual insider/outsider dynamic. You tolerate people who aren't you. When Europe agonizes over tolerance, the question is not "who are we?" Instead, the question is "how do WE best serve THEM?" Tolerance is far less costly to a society than assimilation or marriage. In the 1920s and 30s, many African Americans relocated to France, where they experienced a lightness never-before felt. They were able to sit anywhere in the restaurants, rent any apartment, and play in any club. A whole genre of black literature emerged, as these literati tried to discern why France was this way and America was so brutally oppressive. The writers and poets never discussed one possible answer to the question, because they never tried to become French. Their African Americans' foreignness was a given to both the locals and the visitors alike. Since their claims upon the French were so minimal, the African Americans easily achieved their desires. If tolerance and hospitality are all that is requested, one will never know if tolerance and hospitality are the only gifts offered.

In the 21st century, Europe is shrinking in population at the same time that its population is graying. The generous welfare states built by the post-war nations are endangered: the baby-boom generation is drawing ever-closer to retirement, with its guaranteed benefits. But the population is shrinking. In the near future far fewer workers will be supporting far more retirees. But the Germans, and Italians, and French are not having very many children. Only two options present themselves for European governments to prevent economic collapse: either by ending the welfare state or by importing millions upon millions of new workers.

These problems have been delayed for a spell by expansion. The new EU members from the former communist world will supply a fresh jump-start to trade and wealth-creation. But sooner or later, the homelands of the colonial empires will need to make a hard choice. On the one hand is culture and tradition, and relative poverty. On the other hand is a deep multiethnicity that changes the nature of the culture. This is one of the hardest decisions a society can make.

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