By Miroljub Jevtic, Ph.D.
Recent unrest in France including the capital Paris as well as sporadic unrest in Brussels and Berlin got one American author to acknowledge that "Europe is consternated observing events in Paris".
Certainly, there are plenty of reasons for concern. The extent of the revolt is so large that that it should force a whole re-conceptualization of Europe as a community. While on one side is a story about European multicultural model as a finalized and perfected social product that has to be applied, on the other are the "consumers" of that model that are claiming that it does not exist, naming it as fiction most notably by Abdelkarim Karasko, a man considered the leader of a million strong Muslim community in Spain.
If the Spanish Muslim community leader is saying that there is no multiculturalism in Europe that means that something is wrong with those who are speaking that multiculturalism exists so that the social scientists who have invented the concept now appear as ideologues.
This could be seen out of the thousands examples. The West was formed over the idea of the rule of truth, whatever it might be. But what of these truths we are seeing out of these events in France?
All information that followed unrest avoided to emphasize that it was the riot of the youngsters, which in cultural and racial scope is not something we used to consider as French, despite on legitimacy of these youngsters to be what they really are. It is obvious that concealment of these facts brought down French journalism and science, which created the climate in which current journalism was born. When these events escalated they began to mention that it concerns the imigrants, intentionally avoiding to mention the fact of where these emigrants were coming from.
Paris is full with imigrants. Paris has more Chinese restaurants then there are Serbian restaurants in Belgrade. Yet it wasn't the Chinese rioting.
As rioting persisted, it was reported that mainly North-Africans were behind that. Even this fact only, explains that French authorities, journalists and scientists were frightened to explain what the matter is. They were frighten because for decades they used to persuade domestic population and newcomers that everything is just fine, offering at the same time the identical model to the Balkans. If it was possible for French, Vietnamese, Sri Lankan, Arabians and Africans to live in peace and harmony in Paris, they asked, why it wouldn't be possible for people of the same ethnicity, just with different religion and language, to live like that in the Balkans?
As it was shown now, the situation is not so idyllic as the French wanted us to believe and assure themselves in the first place. What we see then is hiding the truth in order to justify the intellectual failure. Such failure wasn't consequential in the line of unfeasible truth seeking but it came out of the dominant societal climate which disabled respectable analysts to present the real facts.
That is why they were silent from the start of riots, hoping that each new moment could prove that these were just sporadic incidents with eager to prevail them by waves of patriotism to multiculturalism which were invented in the second half of the XX century, as they believed. As the situation progressed for the worse, some questions about what caused it started to emerge but the predominant format of analysis remains as though it came out of Stalin's manual for his political commissars: the cause of riots was blamed on poverty and unemployment and all will be fine when these issues get solved.
However, reporters were very clear that rioters were equipped with scooters and cell phones - gismos hardly associated with poverty - and used them to direct the riots from one epicenter into another.
Observing what is going on in the neighboring France, the newly appointed German Minister of Interior, Wolfgang Schaeuble, was arguing that French type riots will not happen in Germany all the while several vehicles were burning in capital Berlin. Schaeuble also added that integration of German Muslims will be achieved through perfect assimilation of German language by young emigrants. It seems that he doesn't know that many young rebels in Paris speaks French even better then native speakers and that they are teasing French provincials when coming to the capital, because of their accent.
The causes of riots are not economical but the one explained by Kardoso: there is no real multiculturalism. Interviews with Frenchmen of Arabian origin clearly confirm this claim. Many of them speak about problems relating to racial and cultural issues and not the economy.
This is then the crux of the problem in the West: it stands on an erroneous supposition, similar to Marxism of centuries ago, that religion is the issue for primitive and poor people so that once educated and enriched by money religion will, as a motivating factor in politics, wither away.
French riots are then showing that this view is the great aberration. Religion was and still is the most present form of societal consciousness that promotes life of each man, even when personal religiosity is not overtly expressed or maybe marred and hidden by the journalists.
Although in France Roman Catholicism is on the intellectual death bed it does not therefore follow that other religious confessions are on the way out. On the contrary, the disappearance of the Roman Catholic spirit from the French society has not killed Roman Catholicism from the foundations of the French culture nor can the Catholicism be so easily replaced and substituted by some other.
That concerns Muslims and that can be seen all over the Paris. If the hidzab (covering of woman) is part of Islam, then it is hard to explain to those who believe that they are allowed to have religious freedom but at the same time have that freedom regulated by civil law. It cannot be expected from Muslims to walk peacefully by the monument of the Gottfried de Bugnion in the center of Brussels the way Belgians admire him. Bugnion was the king of Jerusalem at the time of Crusader Wars, when Jerusalem was smeared with Muslim's blood till the height of the horses chest as it was written in the middle age manuscripts that were probably exaggeration but a source of belief for a Muslim.
If European countries truly want multicultural model they may have to dismantle their own culture and own heritage to accommodate others by a good feeling. If problems with integration of different cultures exist in Paris and Berlin then it is even more difficult in the Balkans.
