Europe pays the price for cultural na�vet� By William Pfaff Thursday, November 25, 2004
PARIS In the realm of European immigration, the damage done by the political correctness of the past is only now beginning to be felt. . In several countries, notably in Scandinavia, a policy of unquestioning tolerance of cultural differences was adopted because to demand assimilation was thought to imply a "racist" claim to superiority, with the inevitable comparisons with Nazi Germany. . In Germany itself, where nationality was long considered ethnic in origin, immigrants originally were excluded from cultural or political assimilation, with the fiction that they were all "guests" who would eventually go home. Instead, their families followed them to Germany, and they now demand citizenship. . France believed in immigration in principle, but pretended to itself that its Muslim North African immigrants would eventually go away. Now, of course, this substantial minority poses a great problem, which the French are belatedly trying to deal with through efforts to integrate the younger generations. . The troubled case of the Netherlands is the most interesting, however, because the Dutch - like the British - said their aim was a multicultural society composed of equals. This was a convenient illusion, or form of hypocrisy, because the Netherlands, like other West European countries, never ceased to believe in the superiority of its own society and to indulge in a high-minded denial of the power of national cultures and religion. . The Dutch gave immigrants the benefit of their generous welfare system. They took for granted the social discrimination and economic disadvantages that immigrants suffered. Their notion that the Netherlands would eventually become a peaceful multicultural society, in which its large immigrant population would melt away, becoming successful, if exotic, Dutchmen and women, was well intended but unrealistic. . As everyone could see, the Netherlands remained a tight and parochial post-Calvinist society. It was not a likely candidate for multiculturalism. Still, no one imagined that this would lead to an explosion of hatred and violence, even though the conformity that the Netherlands expected was profoundly subversive of Muslim religion and culture. . A crucial part of the Muslim immigrant population rejected the terms of Dutch multiculturalism. It would not even learn to speak Dutch. And a crucial part of Dutch society expressed its own anger at this rejection when Pim Fortuyn, a gay rights activist, made himself into a sensationally successful parliamentary candidate in 1998 by saying that the Netherlands was "full" and wanted no more immigrants. (He was subsequently murdered, but not by a Muslim.) . This year, after Dutch television screened Theo Van Gogh's tendentious attack on the Muslim treatment of women - including images that some Muslims found blasphemous - the filmmaker was murdered, apparently by a young Muslim committed to Islamic fundamentalism. Revenge attacks on Muslims and their schools and mosques followed. . This specifically Dutch tragedy was created by good intentions combined with false assumptions about the human, social and political realities of cultural difference. After the Nazi catastrophe, racial and cultural distinctions were interpreted as cause for discrimination and conflict, and accordingly were not only avoided but denied. Certain illusions about the nature of man were - and are - promoted. People in the West want to continue to believe in these illusions, despite all that history has done to disprove them. . They include the belief that the core values of the Western democracies are innate, and that education, the liberalization of political and social institutions, and political action can liberate these values among people who don't yet recognize them. It is believed that everyone is headed not only toward liberal democracy but also toward secularism or religious indifference. . Western political (and even economic) values are said to be universal, valid for all societies now and in the future. Hence the unity of mankind is only a matter of time. The moral complexity of the human condition in the past is ignored, or is simply unknown. . It all adds up to a na�ve version of the belief in inevitable human progress that arose during the French Enlightenment and has inspired virtually every Western political ideology we have known since - and that history has repeatedly disproved. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! 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