Great
Britain and France's two different integration models have both
failed: the future of the Union's Islamic communities promises
to be rather problematic.
The French suburbs' revolt has brutally brought up a question
that has long hovered over Europe: what possibilities do our societies
have of assimilating a considerable Muslim community without causing
intolerable conflicts? Answers clearly vary depending also on
the political trend. But the fact remains that after the failure
of the British integration model, which produced the attacks on
the London underground last July, the French model too has now
highlighted its faults.
Italy has so far been relatively immune to mass disorders caused
by Muslim immigrants, but the police have already discovered various
conspiracies to organise attacks and they have also decreed a
series of preventive expulsions; besides hundreds of Egyptian
parents' refusal to accept compulsory education (i.e. the school
in via Quaranta in Milan) gives rise to many doubts concerning
the future.
In practice, this relative calm is mostly due to the fact that
our communities have been formed quite recently and they have
still not developed the frustrations, which triggered the folly
of British kamikazes or Parisian fires. On the other hand the
Minister of Internal Affairs, Pisanu, has not concealed his fears
for the future should conditions that are similar to those north
of the Alps develop in Italy too.
As former colonial powers France and Great Britain were the first
to suffer the impact of extra-European migration: hundreds and
thousands of Maghrebi's and Africans have landed in the Hexagon
since the '50s and '60s. They have multiplied through the years
till now they are almost one tenth of the population.
In England instead the major part of migration comprises blacks
from the Caribbean, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who were
initially called in to fill certain voids in the labour market,
but who then often became the victims of the deindustrialisation
process. The two countries have faced the problem in a radically
different manner. Great Britain has encouraged the birth of distinct
ethnic communities with their own identities and associations.
They are free to maintain their respective traditions but they
are also encouraged to participate in public life to such attrian
extent that minorities are today represented by fifteen Members
of Parliament in the House of Commons and by many local councillors.
The number of Caribbean, African and Asian citizens involved in
the media, in cultural and sports associations and in the National
Health Service is also considerable.
The chief goal was the creation of a multicultural society in
which the various ethnic groups' peaceful coexistence was encouraged
in a liberal system. Despite a series of spectacular racist clashes
both in London and in the Midlands, the experiment seemed to yield
satisfactory results till the discovery was made that the Pakistani
community - the one most exposed to extremist Islamic preaching
- was providing dozens of recruits for the Al Qaeda.
Especially second generation Muslim migrants, who were partly
also well integrated in British society though resolved to reject
the values they considered foreign to their culture, gathered
under the banners of Osama Bin Laden first in Afghanistan and
then in Iraq organising the series of bomb attacks, which numbered
about sixty dead in London last July. Journalistic surveys, which
followed, have disclosed that despite a thousand difficulties
Christian and Hindu migrants succeeded in integrating themselves
though they were often confined to the lowest rungs of the social
ladder, while Muslims, especially the younger ones, tended to
react to economic difficulties with an antagonistic and rebellious
attitude.
Instead of taking the course of assimilation followed by their
fathers, many ended up by becoming followers of the "preachers
of hatred", the extremist Imams, whose activities London
has tolerated for too long. Already the years that closely followed
September 11 witnessed some spectacular cases: John Reid, the
mulatto of Jamaican origin who tried to blow up an airliner over
the Atlantic along the London-New York route with a plastic bomb
hidden in a shoe and two British citizens of Pakistani origin
who blew themselves up in Israel at the service of Hamas. But
only after the attacks on the underground did we realise the extent
of the phenomenon to calculate its consequences: never in times
of peace did Great Britain resort to such Draconian laws, which
in November even led to the Parliament's successful and sensational
rejection of the government's proposal to extend the period of
police custody from 14 to 90 days.
The French adopted a different method to face their immigration
situation, which resulted both from the former colonies that were
by now independent and also from the still many overseas territories
(Martinique, Guadalupe and Guyana in America, Réunion in
the Indian Ocean and French Polynesia in Australia): they granted
passports and total integration to all to such an extent that
they lack official statistics on how many citizens have Algerian,
Moroccan, Tunisian, Mauritanian and other origins and how many
of them are Muslims. At the same time the formation of ethnic
and national communities that could have led to multiculturalism
was discouraged to the point of forbidding (last year's controversial
law, which attracted the wrath of extremists on France) the use
of the veil in schools and public offices.
On the other hand we must say that after a period of open borders,
which led to a surge of migrants from poor and overpopulated North
Africa, Paris closed its borders quite soon, thus creating an
army of sans papiers (illegal aliens with neither citizenship
nor rights), thus causing quite a few problems. But family reunions
on the one hand and first generation migrants' high birth rate
led to the situation that by now about one eighth of the French
population comprises non Europeans with a percentage of Muslims,
which is by far the highest in the Union. As all are aware by
now, the results were not brilliant.
With just a few exceptions migrants have ended up in the lowest
rungs of the social ladder, something like the Afro-Americans
in the United States. To house them the State built huge popular
barracks in the suburbs of leading cities. They have invariably
been turned into ghettos as time passed by witnessing the "flight"
of other inhabitants.
The low cultural standards, poor knowledge of European traditions
and a basic inability to absorb a modern industrial society's
rules have led to an unavoidable consequence - a drop in the standard
of education, enhanced living degradation, worse services and
- the last but unavoidable consequence - a very high degree of
unemployment especially among the youth. In the days that followed
the revolt of the suburbs much was written on racism in France,
which first formally conceded citizenship to migrants and then
gradually marginalised them, refusing them the assistance they
require, discriminating them in the labour framework and isolating
them in the suburbs, far from the eyes of the socially refined
bourgeoisie.
In fact, those who seek employment and appear with an Arabic name
have far less possibilities of being employed than native Frenchmen
with the same requisites.
Those who seek a home outside the suburbs have a good probability
of being refused by landlordsunless they belong to the minority,
which has succeeded in rising to a certain social position and
which, in the wake of disorders, has become a sort of oracle for
the media who are hunting for explanations and solutions. After
the dramatic episodes of the '60s, such as the Algerian pogrom
performed by the Parisian police on 17 October 1961, which witnessed
over two hundred people drowned in the Seine and which is to date
recalled as one of the blackest days of the Republic, for many
years the conflict of civilisations has undergone a sort of incubation
phase. If in a political framework this was one of the elements
that led to the birth and then to the exponential growth of Jean
Marie Le Pen's National Front, in an economic and social framework
it did not produce phenomena of unacceptable dimensions at least
till the economic crisis and the subsequent increase in unemployment
highlighted the latent crisis. Disquieting signs that tension
was rising started emerging since the start of the millennium.
Only last year 28 thousand cars were burnt in France - almost
one hundred a day! - compared to the six thousand or little more
that were burnt during the revolt, but since the trend seemed
endemic - almost like road accidents - few paid attention to them.
Now people are frantically wondering whether setting fire to cities
(with a few exceptions like Marseilles, whose historical background
seems to have better equipped it to face the migratory waves)
is due to the lack of integration of minorities or rather to a
wrong integration, in which Maghrebi youth have absorbed the worst
of our civilisation. The philosopher André Glucksman's
theory in this regard is rather unique; he believes that the wrath
of second and third generation Arabic youth is in practice the
sign of perfect integration "in a violent country that is
crossed by winds of hatred and ruled by the logic of power-based
relations". Rather than to Islamism, he attributes their
incendiary fury to a form of modern nihilism, to a sort of destructive
orgy caused by the need to show strength in a context in which
it always pays to do so. According to Glucksman "I burn,
thus I am" would be the motto of those who the Minister of
Internal Affairs Sarkozy called the "dregs of society",
irrespective of the fact that the real victims of their vandalism
are relations, friends and countrymen.
In the Corriere della Sera Alberto Ronchey thought it better not
to attribute the explosion of rage, whose protagonists were at
least partly minors, to just one cause. "It contained everything
- he wrote - vandals as in all crowded suburbs of our times, exalted
and uncontrollable Muslim fanatics, despite strict disapproval
such as stated by the Imam of Paris, outcasts from schools, pyromaniac
hooligans, drug peddlers in war with the police or possessed by
primitive anarchistic anger". If this diagnosis were correct,
the treatment will be even more difficult because it could even
be pointless to offer some of these categories incentives and
grants. In his first meditated reaction to the disorders on the
one hand President Chirac undertook to re-establish order by extending
emergency measures and also "to ensure everybody the same
opportunities" inviting private enterprises, the media and
political parties to offer more room to the minorities. He has
also promised to create a "task force" to help youth
who are undergoing difficulties. But he took care not to propose
the so-called "affirmative action" or positive discrimination
to the advantage of minorities, which the United States instead
adopted to ease the black minority's problems concerning access
to universities and public services: in fact the French would
not have taken the decision too well. In the wake of the French
revolt other European cities such as Berlin, Brussels and even
Athens witnessed a similar effect and the possibility of a sort
of continental Islamic Intifada was mentioned. But careful observation
reveals that problems vary from country to country. In Germany
most Islamic migrants are of Turkish origin, hence they are more
European and less dependent on the Arabic faith.
In Holland, where the film director Theo Van Gogh's murder committed
by a fanatic Moroccan migrant greatly highlighted the local population's
tensions, the majority of Muslims is of Indonesian origin.
Spain, the scene both of the Madrid attacks and of revolts on
the part of seasonal Moroccan workers in the South, is more exposed
to the contagion. However no country counts a concentration of
potential insurgents as the French suburbs, whose redemption,
if feasible, will require many years and loads of money.
Those like me who have lived long in the United States and have
witnessed the bloody revolts in New York, Detroit and Los Angeles'
black ghettos in the '60s and '70s get the suspicion that there
is some analogy with current events in France. The Afro-Americans,
who at the time were still the victims even of legal forms of
discrimination, rebelled against their inferior status by putting
their districts to fire and sword, just as the Maghrebi's did
in Paris, Lion and Lille in November.
Since then much progress has been made, including the famous positive
discrimination; besides Afro-Americans have occupied the famous
chair of the Secretary of State twice consecutively. But on the
whole they have remained the poorest ethnic community, the least
educated and the most problematic one, surpassed meanwhile in
all classifications by new arrivals from Asia and Latin America.
European Muslims and especially those of Arabic origins find themselves
in a similar condition today. Their situation is worsened by the
white population's deep mistrust of them due to the actions of
extremist terrorism.
Some of them, especially Egyptians who are quite a few in Italy,
probably have a higher integration capacity than others. But in
some way the merger with Europeans does not seem to be very successful.
And we recall Cardinal Biffi's warning: during a politically unfair
sermon he said that if we really need migrants, it would be best
to select Christian ones (thus incurring in the Vatican's wrath).
Great
Britain and France's two different integration models have both
failed: the future of the Union's Islamic communities promises
to be rather problematic.
