The first part of Arno Tausch’s essay appeared here on Tuesday.
The summer of 2015 may prove to have been a decisive moment in European and global history. The dramatic arrival of hundreds of thousands of people during a relatively short period of time, traveling via the Balkans and Hungary and toward Austria, Germany, Sweden, and other high-income European countries, will be forever remembered by those who witnessed these events as they unfolded.[1] The swift arrival of 1.3 million asylum seekers, predominantly young men from the hotspots of global conflicts, like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, took the political systems of several European countries, and the European Union itself, by surprise.
At the same time, there was an outpouring of support for multiculturalism, cultural pluralism, and “welcome culture” during these historic late summer days of 2015, especially on the political left.[2] This is especially true for Germany and Austria, where, more than eight decades after the rise of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany, many vowed never again to commit the evils of inhumanity, attempting to draw a lesson from the 1930s. The German government chose to take the lead and to make domestic efforts in order to compensate for the non-cooperative approach of other EU states in welcoming this large influx of people moving northward. For better or worse, “welcome culture” will forever be associated with the name and the policies of outgoing German chancellor Angela Merkel, whose political power is, in any case, now on the wane.[3]
On September 12, 2015, the then Austrian social democratic chancellor Werner Faymann compared Hungary’s tough border control policies with the Shoah and defended the waving through of hundreds of thousands without any proper identity controls whatsoever: “Putting refugees in trains in the belief that they would go somewhere else brings back memories of the darkest period on our continent,” said Faymann. “Dividing human rights by religious denominations is unbearable.”[4] No word about the fact that the majority of the ISIL extremists who carried out the November 13, 2015, attacks in Paris entered Europe while posing as migrants.[5]
New Alignments Taking Shape?
While the European political landscape is sharply divided on how to react to the influx of refugees especially since the summer of 2015,[6] a growing number of rigorous empirical social science studies have begun to question some of the basic assumptions of Europe’s “welcome culture.”[7] Serious scholarly analyses about the consequences of the “refugee crisis” for the religious landscape in Europe are starting to emerge.[8] Political Islam in all its forms continues to exist, and it has definitively arrived and spread in Europe, exacerbating problems of integration that were already present.[9]
In view of the migration trends in Europe, some observers might be tempted to see a decline in the so-called Judeo-Christian identity of Europe[10] due to increased immigration from Muslim countries. But here, we would not like to indulge in the futile debate about the “leading culture” (Leitkultur), which is once again raging in Germany. Although the first scholar to use this term, Bassam Tibi, understood the “leading culture” as the combination of reason, enlightenment, and human rights, and he specifically warned of neo-absolutist Islamism being imported into Europe by large-scale immigration from majority Muslim countries, many right-wing German politicians, most notably the German CDU politician Friedrich Merz, now use Tibi’s term in a contrary way to refer to the “assimilation” of immigrants into the “German core culture.”[11]
But while the rise of radical right-wing populism in Europe, which received a considerable impetus from the influx of refugees into Europe since 2015, is now a well-studied phenomenon in the social sciences,[12] a serious examination of the trade-off between global migration patterns and the possible global spread of Islamist ideology still needs to be done.[13] A legitimate research question in this context is whether or not mass migration from regions where political and religious radicalism are endemic[14] leads to a transfer of instability to the host countries, and thus contributes to instability and terrorism in the centers of the world economy.[15]
While a considerable part of social science in Western countries still tends to dismiss such questions as motivated by pure and simple racism and Islamophobia,[16] there is indeed a growing concern among Western security experts and intelligence agencies about the future direction of Europe if present migration trends continue.[17]
Better Look the Other Way: On the Limits of “Discourse Analysis” and the Islamist Challenge
In the United States since 9/11, there were 86 victims of right-wing terrorist violence, as of mid-October 2018. In addition, eleven victims were murdered in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting on the Shabbat of October 27, 2018. Jihadist Islamist violence killed 104 people in the United States during that same period.[18] As for Europe, freely available databases present an adequate picture of the realities and, to redress the imbalances in the European debate, now include the official European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend Reports[19] as well as the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) reporting system.[20] This reporting covers a very large array of relevant topics for our debate, including anti-Semitism.[21]
The overview of the failed, foiled, and completed terror attacks in 2017 per EU member state and per terrorist group affiliation, as reported by the European Commission, speaks a clear language about the danger of jihadist violence on European soil and justifies our emphasis on the study of predictable societal patterns and Islamist violence in the wake of the massive influx of refugees to Europe since late summer 2015.[22]
Of the 205 terror attacks reported in Europe in 2017, 137 (66.83%) were separatist in character, while 33 (16.10%) were jihadist, 24 (11.71%) were left-wing, and 5 (2.44%) were right-wing.[23] In other words, there were 6.6 times more jihadist terrorist attacks than right-wing terrorist attacks in Europe.
Unease about “imported” anti-Semitism and even terrorism is spreading, especially among Europe’s Jewish communities.[24] The terrible events in Paris on November 13, 2015, that killed at least 130 people and wounded hundreds,[25] as well as rising Islamist attacks on Jewish people and institutions all over Europe, are typical of this situation.[26] The European Union’s human rights monitoring institution, the FRA (formerly the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights), was previously reluctant to come up with clear conclusions about Islamist violence against Jews in Europe, but it seems to have changed its publication policies.[27]
Such an inability to name things as they are also applies to the social sciences. Rood Koopmans, a Berlin-based Dutch sociologist who documented high rates of Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe,[28] was quickly accused of being racist by his left-wing students and colleagues in Berlin.[29] The German proverb “If it’s not possible, then it can’t be,” (Es kann nicht sein, was nicht sein darf) seems to apply again. Koopmans’s analysis deserves to be kept in mind when we consider the current state of the debate in Europe. In his lengthy interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit,[30] he states that migration research is politics by other means and that uncritical pro-migration scientists do not want to answer questions that have arisen in the course of recent years, because they already know the answer: there are simply no problems with immigration, there are only problems with discrimination.
In 2013, Koopmans published the aforementioned study on Islamic fundamentalism and xenophobia among European Muslims. It had a global echo, even in countries like Pakistan, Israel, and the United States. Yet in Germany no one reacted, with the exception of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which called him a “club swinger” (Keulenschwinger) because he “operates with the fundamentalism club.”[31] Berlin students who sat on the powerful student committees governing the university even accused Koopmans of providing by his research a “breeding ground for anti-Muslim racism.” For Koopmans, the fundamentalist views of many Muslims—about democracy, about Jews, about women or homosexuals—are responsible for the fact that it is so easy for Islamists in Europe to operate. “If only a few thousand extremists were involved,” said Koopmans, “and if Muslim communities were so determined to fight hatred in their own ranks, as their federation representatives always claim, the problem would have been solved long ago.”[32]
Notes
1. Phillip Connor, “Number of Refugees to Europe Surges to Record 1.3 Million in 2015,” Pew Research Center, August 2016.
2. Orkan Kösemen, “Willkommenskultur in Deutschland: Mehr als nur ein Modewort?,” Bertelsmann Stiftung, December 2017.
3. About Merkel’s recent decision to resign the chairpersonship of the German Christian Democratic governing party, see Katrin Bennhold and Melissa Eddy, “Germany Without Angela Merkel: Unthinkable? Think Again, She Says,” New York Times, October 29, 2018. About Merkel and the refugee crisis of 2015, see Katrin Bennhold, “As Germany Takes In Refugees, It Also Rehabilitates Its Image,” New York Times, September 23, 2015. See also Giovanna Dell’Orto and Irmgard Wetzstein, Refugee News, Refugee Politics: Journalism, Public Opinion and Policymaking in Europe (London: Routledge, 2019); Joyce Marie Mushaben, “Wir schaffen das! Angela Merkel and the European Refugee Crisis,” German Politics 26, no. 4 (2017): 516–33; Sebastian Jäckle and Pascal D. König, “The Dark Side of the German ‘Welcome Culture’: Investigating the Causes behind Attacks on Refugees in 2015,” West European Politics 40, no. 2 (2017): 223–51; Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy (New York: Nation Books, 2017); and Arno Tausch, “Europe’s Refugee Crisis: Zur aktuellen politischen Ökonomie non Migration, Asyl und Integration in Europa,” SSRN, October 22, 2015.
4. “Österreichs Kanzler vergleicht Orbáns Flüchtlingspolitik mit Holocaust,” Spiegel, September 12, 2015.
5. James Rothwell, “Majority of Paris Attackers Used Migration Routes to Enter Europe, Reveals Hungarian Counter-Terror Chief,” Telegraph, October 2, 2016.
6. It is beyond the scope of this article to analyze the debates in other Western democracies. Readers will be well aware of the fact that in Israel opinions are also deeply divided on how to deal with refugee issues. As already stated, the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, frequently refers to refugees from Africa as “infiltrators.” See Bar Peleg, “Netanyahu: Israel Will Keep Deporting ‘Infiltrators’, Eritrea-Ethiopia Peace Treaty Will Help Accelerate Expulsion,” Haaretz, October 9, 2018. A fair number of scholars have sharply criticized this terminology. See Hadas Yaron, Nurit Hashimshony-Yaffe, and John Campbell. “‘Infiltrators’ or Refugees? An Analysis of Israel’s Policy Towards African Asylum-Seekers,” International Migration 51, no. 4 (2013): 144–57; and Yonathan Paz, “Ordered Disorder: African Asylum Seekers in Israel and Discursive Challenges to an Emerging Refugee Regime,” research paper, UNHCR, Policy Development and Evaluation Service, 2011.
7. Seung-Whan Choi, New Explorations into International Relations: Democracy, Foreign Investment, Terrorism, and Conflict (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2016).
8. Ulrich Schmiedel and Graeme Smith, eds., Religion in the European Refugee Crisis (New York: Springer International Publishing, 2018).
9. Sayyid Quṭb and Albert Bergesen, The Sayyid Qutb Reader: Selected Writings on Politics, Religion, and Society (New York: Routledge, 2008); Bassam Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder (Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 2002); Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, “The True Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Policy 135 (2003): 63–70; Eric Neumayer, “Death Penalty: The Political Foundations of the Global Trend towards Abolition,” Human Rights Review 9, no. 2 (2008): 241–68; Amy Adamczyk and Cassady Pitt, “Shaping Attitudes about Homosexuality: The Role of Religion and Cultural Context,” Social Science Research 38, no. 2 (2009): 338–51; Russell A. Berman and Arno Tausch, “Support for Terrorism in Muslim Majority Countries and Implications for Immigration Policies in the West,” Strategic Assessment 20, no. 1 (2017): 7–21; Elmar Schlueter, Bart Meuleman, and Eldad Davidov, “Immigrant Integration Policies and Perceived Group Threat: A Multilevel Study of 27 Western and Eastern European Countries,” Social Science Research 42, no. 3 (2013): 670–82; Pippa Norris and Ronald F. Inglehart, “Muslim Integration into Western Cultures: Between Origins and Destinations,” Political Studies 60, no. 2 (2012): 228–51; Rahsaan Maxwell, “Evaluating Migrant Integration: Political Attitudes Across Generations in Europe 1,” International Migration Review 44, no. 1 (2010): 25–52; Arno Tausch and Philippe Jourdon, Trois essais pour une économie politique du 21e siècle (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 2011).
10. See especially Bassam Tibi, “The Totalitarianism of Jihadist Islamism and Its Challenge to Europe and to Islam,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 1 (2007): 35–54; Walter Laqueur, “Europe’s Long Road to the Mosque,” in Culture and Civilization, ed. Irving Horowitz (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 158–67. For a critical evaluation, see also Eirikur Bergmann, “The Eurabia Doctrine,” in Conspiracy & Populism: The Politics of Misinformation (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 123–49.
11. Bassam Tibi, Europa ohne Identität: Europäisierung oder Islamisierung (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2016). Friedrich Merz formulated his ideas, among others, in “Immigration and Identity,” Die Welt, October 25, 2000. Readers, interested in this debate, are also referred to the summary written by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education, BPP, available here.
12. Tjitske Akkerman, Sarah L. de Lange, and Matthijs Rooduijn, eds., Radical Right-wing Populist Parties in Western Europe: Into the Mainstream? (London: Routledge, 2016).
13. Tibi, Islamism and Islam; Leonid Grinin, Andrey Korotayev, and Arno Tausch, Islamism, Arab Spring, and the Future of Democracy (New York: Springer, 2018).
14. Berman and Tausch, “Support for Terrorism in Muslim Majority Countries.”
15. Seung-Whan Choi, “Does Restrictive Immigration Policy Reduce Terrorism in Western Democracies?,” Perspectives on Terrorism 12, no. 4 (2018): 14–25.
16. Matti Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007); Nathan Lean and John L. Esposito, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims (London: Pluto Press, 2012); Teun A. Van Dijk, “Critical Discourse Studies: A Sociocognitive Approach,” in Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (Los Angeles: Sage, 2015), pp. 63–74; Nasar Meer, “Racialization and Religion: Race, Culture and Difference in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 3 (2013): 385–98; Sieglinde Rosenberger and Iris Stöckl, “The Politics of Categorization–Political Representatives with Immigrant Background between ‘the Other’ and ‘Standing for,'” Politics, Groups, and Identities 6, no. 2 (2018): 217–36; Astrid Mattes, ” How Religion Came into Play: ‘Muslim’ as a Category of Practice in Immigrant Integration Debates,” Religion, State & Society 46, no. 3 (2018): 186–205.
17. Dorle Hellmuth, “Countering Jihadi Terrorists and Radicals the French Way,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 38, no. 12 (2015): 979–97; Dorle Hellmuth, “Countering Jihadi Radicals and Foreign Fighters in the United States and France: Très Similaire,” Journal for Deradicalization 4 (2015): 1–43; Christian Lequesne, “French Foreign and Security Challenges after the Paris Terrorist Attacks,” Contemporary Security Policy 37, no. 2 (2016): 306–18; Michel Debacq et al., “La lutte antiterroriste et l’État de droi,” Esprit 9 (2017): 86–100; Bertrand Warusfel and Sébastien-Yves Laurent, Transformations et réformes de la sécurité et du renseignement en Europe (Pessac: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2016).
18. Daniel Byman, “When to Call a Terrorist a Terrorist,” Foreign Policy, October 27, 2018.
19. European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2018 (TESAT 2018).
20. “Publications and Resources,” European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.
21. “Antisemitism: Overview of Data Available in the European Union 2006–2016,” report, November 2017, European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.
22. European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2018.
23. Six attacks were classified in the Commission Report as “not specified,” i.e., 2.93%. There were no single-issue terror attacks in 2017.
24. On France, see James McAuley, “The Brutal Killing of a Holocaust Survivor Raises Anti-Semitism Fears in France,” Washington Post, March 26, 2018; on Sweden, see Josefin Dolsten, “Facing Death Chants and Hate Crimes, Sweden’s Jews Live in a Climate of Fear,” Times of Israel, December 22, 2015; on Germany, see Melissa Eddy, “In Berlin, a Show of Solidarity Does Little to Dampen Jewish Fears,” New York Times, April 25, 2018. This list could be continued endlessly.
25. “Attacks in Paris,” New York Times; and “2015 Paris Terror Attacks Fast Facts,” CNN.
26. James McAuley, “How the Pittsburgh Shooting Compares to Attacks on Jews in Europe, Where Anti-Semitism Has Been Growing,” Washington Post, October 28, 2018.
27. Marc Perelman, “E.U. Accused of Burying Report on Antisemitism Pointing to Muslim Role,” Forward, November 28, 2003; and “Die Studie zum Antisemitismus in der EU,” Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Newsletter no. 26 (2003).
28. Ruud Koopmans, “Religious Fundamentalism and Hostility against Out-Groups: A Comparison of Muslims and Christians in Western Europe,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 41, no. 1 (2015): 33–57.
29. Armin Pfahl-Traughber, “Beiträge zur Debatte um Integration und Multikulturalismus,” haGalil, July 9, 2017; Gerald Wagner, “Eisberg in der Wohlfühlzone,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 27, 2016; and Mariam Lau, “Kühler Querkopf,” Die Zeit, December 6, 2017.
30. Lau, “Kühler Querkopf.”
31. Sven Astheimer, “‘Die meisten Menschen wollen unbequeme Fakten nicht hören,'” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 29, 2016.
32. Lau, “Kühler Querkopf.”
