IF ANYONE HAD any doubt about the very real threat to immigrants from Europe’s extreme right, they should look to the murder last Tuesday of a Moroccan couple in Brussels. They were shot by their neighbor who was a supporter of the extreme right-wing Flemish party, the Vlaams Blok.
This was a racist killing. There is shock in Belgium at what happened, but it is not universal. Nor is the Vlaams Blok likely to suffer any drop in support as a result. Immigration remains an issue for Belgians, as elsewhere in Western Europe, and the chilling reality is that immigrants there — a large proportion of whom are Muslim — have reason to be worried for the future.
The issue is not going to subside for two reasons. First, more and more people, particularly from Africa, want the security and prosperity that Europe is seen to provide. It is ironic that they should head for a place believing that it will give them security when what might await them is violence, maybe even death. For the moment what befell the Moroccan couple is, thankfully, a rare exception; while it is, a swelling tide of immigrants will beat constantly on Europe’s shores.
The second reason is the growth in regional and national identities as a counterbalance to the rise of a united Europe. Across the continent, people are looking to their roots. They increasingly identify themselves as Bavarians, Scots, Corsicans, Flemings, Welsh, English, Sicilians, Galicians or, where there is any deep-seated nation-state identity, as French, Danes, Dutch. It is difficult for immigrants to fit into these revived nationalist identities which by their very nature are highly exclusive. One can be an Asian Briton — but an Asian Englishman? An African Fleming? A Chinese Sicilian?
These are seen as ethnic contradictions. Even English are excluded from being Scots, Castilians from being Catalan — and vice versa. True, there is no problem with concept of a black Frenchman, but in the case of France there is a whole culture which the immigrant has to buy into. Like the US, France may be a multiethnic society (at least one grandparent of one in three French people was born outside France) but also like the US, it is a monocultural society where those who seem to differ are viewed with the greatest suspicion — which is why Le Pen does so well.
It is not that immigration and the associated issue of asylum seekers are uniquely European issues. China and Japan are currently embroiled in a blazing row after Chinese police swooped into a Japanese consulate last week and removed a group of North Koreans claiming asylum. There are tens of thousands of North Koreans in China demanding asylum but Beijing regards them as economic migrants who should be sent home.
In this case, no one criticizes China as racist, or the many other countries which deport migrants by the thousands. What makes Europe different is that its states welcomed immigrants, gave them citizenship, told them that they would be safe, that they could retain their culture and identities, that the law would be applied equally to them as to the indigenous citizens. Now it seems that as Europeans re-embrace their identities the promise is at risk. That is the danger facing Europe’s Muslim immigrants.
One shudders to think of what would happen to Muslims and other minorities if parties like France’s National Front and Belgium’s Vlaams Blok come to power. For the moment, it is no more than rumblings on a far horizon, although for the Moroccan couple in Brussels, their fate was just as real as those who suffered under the Nazis and the thousands slaughtered in Srebrenica. But the outpouring of national grief in the Netherlands at the assassination of the far right leader there sends clear signals that what was previously considered unacceptable has now crept past the veil of acceptability. It is not just in the Netherlands, it is across all Europe.
