As the French march on the streets against Le Pen, while polls suggest he could gather a third of the vote in today's presidential run-off, we in other European countries are bound to ask: Could it happen here?
Of course, much is peculiarly French: the fact that both main candidates, Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin, had been in power at the same time, so a protest vote was likely to go against both; the habit of using the first round of the presidential election to register a protest vote; the fragmentation of the party system. Yet other elements are reproduced across much of Europe: the disillusionment with politics, reflected in soaring rates of abstention ("Better a crook than a fascist" is the French Left's resounding second-round endorsement of Chirac); the feeling of working class or unemployed voters that the whole project of "Europe" threatens them; fears about unemployment, crime and immigration. This cocktail has also pumped right-nationalist populist parties up towards the 20 percent mark in Austria, Belgium and Holland.
Each ingredient of this nasty cocktail needs a separate chemical analysis. The most alarming, though, is the attitude to immigration, and to the resulting ethnic minorities. Le Monde recently published a colored map of Le Pen's vote beside one of the number of "non-EU foreigners" living in each administrative department of France. The correlation is startlingly clear. The one is a vote against the other. If there is such a thing as a typical Le Pen voter, he is a white, male, unemployed worker in the east of France who thinks some Moroccan has stolen his wallet and his job.
Now our ethnic minorities will inevitably grow. And they should grow. I say that because I like human diversity. But even if you would rather spend your whole life among white, beer-drinking monoglots, you must want the minorities to grow out of pure economic self-interest. On present trends, the working-age population of the existing EU will be in decline by 2010. Someone has to keep the economy going and pay your pension.
Meanwhile, poor people from North Africa and the Near East will continue to risk their lives under trucks and trains in the hope of a better life. They are often disappointed. I shall never forget a recent encounter with a young, angry-eyed Moroccan called Yacine, in a poor quarter of Madrid. He had entered Spain under a truck. He had no papers to get a proper job. And so he moonlights and steals. "I live," he told me, "like a wolf."
To be quite clear: immigration is not the cause of Europe's Le Pen-itis. But one cause of Le Pen-itis is most certainly the way Europe has handled immigration. When we say "Europe" in this field we still, in practice, largely mean individual European countries, and of course national approaches differ. Britain, as usual, is more different than most -- starting with the fact that our main ethnic minorities don't come from Europe's immediate periphery.
Nothing is more urgent in the shadow of Le Pen than to work out which approach to immigration is best, and how it can be improved. This is not just about what we think our governments or the EU should do. It's about what we ourselves should do in our everyday dealings with those who live next door or just up the road.
Here are a few thoughts, which certainly don't add up to a policy. First, Europe can't take in everyone who wants to come, any more than the United States can. There is a case for quotas. There is a case for keeping people out. But once they are here to stay, there is no justification at all for letting them go on living like wolves. Or even just as reluctantly tolerated "foreigners." Germany, for example, has until recently had the absurd practice of officially treating Turks who have lived and worked in Germany for twenty years as "foreigners."
So those who are here to stay should be full and equal citizens. But citizenship should not be a cheap formality. On the web you can find instructions for passing the US Citizenship Test. We need something like that too. Citizenship has minimum requirements and obligations. We urgently need a debate about what our minimum is. People cannot actually live in an academic playground version of multiculturalism, based on pure cultural relativism.
I am sure the essential minimum includes an absolute commitment to respect the law of the land, embedded as that now is in a European and international framework of human rights. I suspect it will involve some minimal cultural norms, such as a working knowledge of English. But I don't think it should involve a great deal more.
Beyond this minimum, we have to be realistic about multiculturalism. It doesn't mean one long cross-cultural festival, with everyone joining in the other's ritual dance. Even the famous "multi-culti" Sarajevo was never really like that. When Sarajevo worked before the Second World War, it was because Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim and Jewish communities lived side by side, mainly in different quarters, with a lot of everyday cooperation and a certain amount of mild interest in the other's culture. When it worked in the latter years of Tito's Yugoslavia, it was the result of far-reaching secular integration, intermarriage, and a general mixing-up in which the original cultures were either forgotten or heavily diluted. (During the siege of Sarajevo, I asked one writer to summarize his city's lost multicultural way of life; he answered, "sex, drugs and rock "n roll.")
I think I know one small European country today that comes close to combining both the Sarajevo models. It has a lot of peaceful coexistence based on separate communities, with mild cross-cultural curiosity. (I like your food, you like my music). And it has a lot of secularized integration, based on the fading of older cultures. This country is not called Britain or England. It is certainly not the England of Bradford or Oldham, which have more in common with Marseilles than they would ever dream of acknowledging. No, this country is called London. I don't want to idealize it, but I reckon London is the closest anywhere in Europe comes to a civilized way of living with the ethnic diversity that is Europe's future. Analyse what works in London, and we might have Europe's best answer to Le Pen.
Timothy Garton Ash is a fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and the Hoover Institution, Stanford.
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