“It’s Not Just France. It’s Europe”

In an article of the above title in the New Republic, James Forsyth, an assistant editor at Foreign Policy, convincingly demonstrates that the difficulty of integrating large numbers of Muslims into secular, democratic societies is not limited to France. Britain, Spain, and Holland, have adopted different policies, but none of them, Forsyth shows, has been very successful.

What, then, should Europe do? Forsyth seems to suggest it should become more like us:

Europe should consider why Muslims are so much more integrated and successful in the United States. Arab families in America (though not all Muslim) are on average better off than the rest of the U.S. population: Their median family income is $52,300, 4.6 percent higher than average; the opposite is generally true in Europe. One reason is that Muslims who migrated to the United States were usually better educated and better off than those who went to Europe. But another is that the United States is far more welcoming to people of faith than a Europe where the dominant religion is, to use Timothy Garton-Ash’s phrase, “evangelical secularism.” Europeans should also follow the American lead on citizenship tests, which a growing number of countries are introducing. Unfortunately, unlike the U.S. version, they are geared more toward imparting the kind of knowledge you find at the beginning of a Lonely Planet guide than inculcating future citizens with the values on which the state is founded. While the U.S. test asks about the American Revolution, the British one wants you to know what P.G. stands for. (Parental Guidance, a cinema classification, since you ask.)

But then, quite oddly, he writes:

Ironically the politician being denounced for inflaming the French rioters, interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, has some of the best ideas about how Europe could better integrate its Muslim citizens. Sarkozy argues that affirmative action is needed for Muslims, heresy in egalitarian France. He also proposes that the state fund mosques. This is imperative: Otherwise large numbers of mosques will continue to preach the divisive, extremist doctrine of Wahabism.

I have discussed Sarkozy’s call for “affirmative action” here, but let me add that giving state preferences to an immigrant religious/ethnic minority hardly seems like a sure road to social peace. In the U.S., “black and white together” was the motto of the civil rights movement, until its turn toward preferences played a large role in provoking a white backlash and in effect made the remnants of the old civil rights movement a wholly owned subsidiary of one political party (or is it vice versa?).

What reduces racial tension most effectively is a vibrant economy producing good jobs in combination with vigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. I suspect that state promotion of ethnic and religious preferences in the stagnant economies of Europe would provoke even fiercer opposition than it did here, especially when one considers the strong anti-clerical tradition in France.

And surely the United States should not be held up as a model for religious preferences. Since our own domestic “evangelical secularists” go ballistic whenever religious groups receive the same benefits as other groups (vouchers to attend religious schools as well as secular ones, for example), you can imagine how they — and not only they — would respond to state funding of mosques. Indeed, one of the reasons Americans are so welcoming to people of faith is that we don’t have to pay for their churches, and one of the reasons we have become less welcoming lately is that we do have to pay extra for a number of services for them. When these immigrants then receive preferences, (at least those of them who are Hispanic), the welcome becomes considerably less hospitable.

If the experience of the United States has anything to teach the rest of the world about how to integrate racial and religious minorities — and I believe it does — it is that the best way to reduce tension and promote integration is firm adherence to the principle of racial and religious neutrality.

I’m not sure I would wish what racial preferences have produced here even on the French.