Brookings: Experts - Jonathan Laurence

Muslim Integration in Germany

Jonathan Laurence — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's Note: In an interview with NPR's Charles Hawley, Jonathan Laurence discusses Muslim integration in Germany along with its implication of increasing cultural tensions.

Charles Hawley: Primarily I know that you’re mostly focused on immigration, Muslims in Europe. The debate in Germany I find to be somewhat unique, in Bonn a small party of anti-Islamist populists decided in their campaign for the state elections to display Mohammad caricatures in front of Muslim facilities and they engendered a response that was perhaps not surprising, but was nonetheless unfortunate, when Salafists attacked the police protecting the small demonstration. How is it that such a small tiny group could define the debate about Islam in the German press for months?

Jonathan Laurence: Well there are two tiny groups in that case that are defining the German debate rather unhelpfully at the same time. And each has its own place of primacy even though they’re really quite small. (Unintelligible) has its most recent experience in the public realm as the prime mover behind a campaign against the construction of a grand mosque in Cologne’s city center. Which is not far from the main cathedral. And their plan to build a Mosque in central Cologne inspired this small coalition of self-anointed anti-Islamization prophets basically who view any sign of permanence of Islam in Germany or in neighboring countries to be a real challenge to the country’s fundamental identity. So out of really very small numbers, they were able to mount this very visible campaign against the construction of the mosque and this lead to some real significant clashes. That fact brought out I think some of the worst in the Muslim origin population in that the mainstream organizations which are basically all of them said that if you don’t want us to have a transparent visible proper mosque in the city center, then why do you criticize the prayer spaces that we have that are in the second courtyard. We’re just trying to make ourselves at home here. And so the (unintelligible) movement has its roots in this and wound up provoking this Salafist fringe within the organized Muslim community, which is really tiny, we’re talking in the low thousands for the entire country.

Hawley: You spoke also of the fact that the (Unintelligble) is interested in maintaining the identity of that region of Germany as a whole. When talking to them of course, they also emphasize or they primarily emphasize that they are there to defend democracy. Is that an honest argument on their part?

Laurence: Not entirely, if you allow that this democracy with its constitution upholds religious freedom. And what they are objecting to within Islamic organizations within Germany is more a result of Islam not having found analogous institutional structures to the churches or synagogues and other religious communities that have been here for a while. The German constitution, the Grundgesetz, took over from the Weimar constitution a whole section concerning religious freedoms, allowing for religious communities to be formed, allowing for religious communities to be recognized as public law corporations, and to enjoy certain privileges. So to teach in public schools an hour of religion each week, to collect some funds, revenue, church taxes for the running of the community, to have seats on the boards of certain public broadcasting corporations. There’s a whole range of privileges, which Muslims now that they are becoming more and more part of the citizenry are asking for access to quite naturally. So the idea that preventing them from exercising their constitutional rights is a defense of democracy is somewhat disingenuous. But what they are objecting to in the (Unintelligible) circles are the radical fringes of the religion.

Hawley: What is it about that political background that makes Germany prone to these periodic orgies of angst?

Laurence: Well Germany has this funny experience of dual dictatorship in the 20th century, which has really conditioned the way that citizens experience democracy. The West German Federal Republic was already quite constrained in its international degrees of freedom because of its anchoring in NATO, but also because of the American occupation. And then of course the Soviet occupation, which wound up taking the form of East German Democratic Republic, extended also an experience of essentially totalitarianism from the Nazi period of the Third Reich. And so I think that those two experiences of dictatorship as perceived from the West led to a whole series of restrictions on how far freedoms should be allowed to go because of the risk of their spilling over into intolerance. And so a kind of anti-fascist broadly speaking mentality of no freedom for the enemies of freedom developed. And of course to have activities on the politically extreme is perfectly natural in Western democracy, it’s not possible that the parliamentary party system covers everyone. And if you have freedom of opinion, then you have to expect that there are going to be some people out there with really nasty opinions. But it’s very hard for I think Germans to feel quite responsible for those experiences of dictatorship and ensuring that they never occur again. So it’s often coming from a kind of well-intentioned place. When they want to prevent the spread of Islamism, that’s not just pulling out, that’s Germany government policy essentially. They don’t speak to groups that define themselves as Islamist even if they’re nonviolent. So the aims of that are perfectly understandable, they don’t want to come to a situation where there is a religious theocracy.

Listen to the full interview at nprberlin.de »

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: NPR Berlin

Image Source: © Thomas Peter / Reuters

Integration or Emancipation? (Muslime in Deutschland brauchen Emanzipation)

Jonathan Laurence — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's Note: In his article in Der Tagesspiegel, Jonathan Laurence takes a look at the degree to which Muslims in Europe – many of them immigrants – have become truly emancipated. Emancipation of a minority, he argues, is different from their integration or assimilation. As political situations come and go and change daily attitudes towards Germany’s religious minorities, Germany must be careful to preserve the small steps already taken toward minority emancipation. Read the article in English or German below.

German President Joachim Gauck’s visit to the Sehitlik mosque in Berlin before Eid al Adha earlier this month heartened critics who regretted his earlier hesitation to claim Islam as an integral part of federal republic. The about-face revealed a paradox within the man – just as within the country and perhaps the continent – that is tearing at the fabric of 21st century European Islamic life. Despite enormous progress, European Muslims still do not enjoy what has historically been called “emancipation.”

No mainstream politician denies the permanence of Islam’s presence. But as Islam is more visibly accommodated in the public sphere, it elicits fiercer resistance from nativists, who want proof of loyalty and a higher tribute in exchange for admission to the nation. Islam-critical populism no longer lingers on Germany’s political extremes alone. This reopens a wound that 1999’s historic citizenship reform was intended to heal, leading to “hyphenated” Germans’ frustration with limits on religious liberties and apparent double standards in the fight against political and religious extremism.

Rooting Islamic organizations and religious observance in domestic institutions in Germany and elsewhere in Europe is undeniably underway: the Deutsche Islam Konferenz and other consultations have led to hundreds of new prayer spaces in construction, the availability of religious education, and scores of imams, teachers and theologians who are being locally trained.

The legal and political status of Islam, nonetheless, escapes easy categorization. Two trends are impeding the anchoring of Islam. Within Europe, Islamkritik has slipped from aiming to preserve the “neutrality” of the public sphere or to defend “western human rights,” and towards a basic dubiousness about Islamic religious practices in general. This in turn reinforces the protective instinct within the countries of origin, where new ministries are to maintain religious, political and economic ties with diasporas abroad.

Emancipation in the sense of the way Prussian reformers Stein and Hardenberg used the term, offers a robust and realistic way out: The mass entry of a previously excluded group into the democratic order, based on the rule of law and equal rights and obligations as citizens -- including collective rights, if they choose to join a religious community or certain other types of secondary association. Of course, it has also always implied new duties, including taxation and the possibility of military conscription. Emancipation is a generational process that takes time; France’s Jews received full rights in 1791, whereas it took the 1871 Imperial Constitution (Reichsverfassung) to grant the same across a united Germany. The process has always been characterized by a “dual movement.” With one hand, the state liberates, equalizes and enfranchises, and acknowledges collective identity. While with the other, it forces adaptation and the reform of community structures.

Over the long and winding course of democratization in 19th and early 20th century Europe, Groups who were once absent from the body politic – including Jews, minority Catholics, and the working classes – gradually acquired full citizenship. And they were soon thereafter granted “group” status –in the form of central councils, concordats or trade unions — to administer institutional privileges and to anchor their organizations domestically within a constitutional framework.

But why use this outmoded expression? The word evokes the failures of German democracy, but it might as well point a way to reclaiming some of the brighter spots in the country’s democratization. Twelve years of Third Reich should not be atoned by reneging on earlier progress.

Emancipation also offers a way out of the false dichotomy of integration or assimilation. Integration cannot be the appropriate word for the millions who were born, raised and educated here, and who don’t consider themselves to be foreigners or immigrants. And to them, assimilation sounds like a euphemism for dissolution. In other words: if you uncover your hair, give up your minarets, stop your brutal halal slaughter and cruel circumcision rituals – then we have a deal: Welcome! Emancipation, in contrast, has historically meant becoming subject to the rule of law – and thus winning protection from administrative arbitrariness – and armchair theologians.

Why even bring religion into this discussion? Isn’t the focus on religion divisive and problematic and a contribution to needless communitarianism? There is no reason to pretend or to wish that Islamic identity or piety be the defining trait of the generations born here of immigrant background. Just as with “free markets”, which do not exist suspended in a theoretical space, but are regulated in myriad ways, so too is “universal citizenship” structured with many formal and informal institutions. Citizenship guarantees individual religious rights. But it is group status – usually in the form of public law – that gives meaning to those rights in city halls, government ministries, armed forces, prisons, schools, hospitals and sometimes even in public streets.

While not all European states have immigrant or foreign culture-oriented policies, all have religion offices and maintain some privileges, and often, a formal relationship with faith communities. State-Islam relations have begun to lay the groundwork for German Islam. Muslim students in NRW now have the option of Islam religion classes. Hamburg just concluded a historic state contract with several major Islamic federations. At eight universities, there are now centers of Islamic studies or chairs training future teachers, imams and theologians. This is still at a small scale: the cumulative enrollment is in the low dozens, while there’s an existing need for more than 2,000 imams and religious leaders in Germany.

This new institutional presence has already helped reduce tensions related to the “defense of Islam” in the public sphere and helped manage cyclical religious scandals. The YouTube user who uploaded an anti-Islamic video that went viral in September was a geistiger Brandstifter (intellectual arsonist). But the Muslim communities of Europe proved they are not a tinderbox, waiting to catch fire at the slightest provocation. Images of attacks abroad on schools, consulates, and embassies were dispiriting, yet all of the tragic violence occurred elsewhere. In Europe, the angry responses took the form of lawsuits and small demonstrations.

It’s tempting to think that nothing has changed in the quarter century, since Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. But the reaction to violent extremists should be proportionate to their numbers. The legal complaints filed against authors and magazines illustrate the power of formal institutional access that comes with full emancipation. By registering their offense, by protesting discrimination where they see it, European Muslims have begun to employ their democratic rights.

Another example of this came during last spring’s NRW elections. In the aftermath of a violent Salafist protest against the Prophet cartoons in Bonn, something much more meaningful took place. Federations representing hundreds of thousands of German Muslims condemned the violent protesters and implored constituents to express their dissent by fulfilling the civic duty of voting. As the proportion of Muslims of foreign nationality living here decreases, democratic political institutions are increasingly kicking in.

Nonetheless, the mixed experience of the current Federal Interior Minister reminds Germans of the need for non-partisan (überparteilich) consensus on Islam policy. The NSU murders and revelations of rightwing infiltration of the security apparatus, moreover, in addition to differences in counter-radicalization strategies, has broadened and deepened the sense of mistrust vis-à-vis German institutions.

Perceptions matter, and many German Muslims perceive that their community’s status shifts dramatically from one President to another, and from one coalition government to the next. The communication channels between Islamic organizations and the authorities during these crises never completely broke down, but relations have suffered. This is not unique to Germany, of course – France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the UK all have experienced some form of it. In the absence of that consensus, it pushes the discussion in minority communities back towards the option of dual citizenship, just in case. The loss of confidence in German or European institutions would mean a return to internationalization.

But this is also a genuine opportunity for Germany to push back. The dual citizenship battle shouldn’t be about confiscating foreign passports. It is rather about endowing the German identity card with binding commitments. Without a basic minimum set of guaranteed rights there will always be a market for protection – whether from ancestral homeland governments or transnational political movements.

This is a complex and multi-level interaction between state and religious actors within and across borders. Nonetheless, it is the nation-state that is ultimately responsible for guaranteeing the free exercise of its citizens’ religious rights. Only individual European governments can emancipate Europe’s Muslims, and the longer there is no final status agreement – in whatever form that take, whether it be Religionsgemeinschaft, Körperschaftstatus or something new – then the more fragile and reversible that progress will be. Until then, a real danger exists that the modest early accomplishments of emancipation will be undone before Muslims’ incorporation has even taken place.

Muslime in Deutschland brauchen Emanzipation

Anlässlich des muslimischen Opferfestes hat Bundespräsident Joachim Gauck im Oktober die Berliner Sehitlik-Moschee besucht. Seine Kritiker ließ diese Tatsache Hoffnung schöpfen – jene Kritiker nämlich, die seine frühere Weigerung bedauert hatten, den Islam als integralen Bestandteil Deutschlands anzuerkennen. Diese Kehrtwende legt Gaucks paradoxe Haltung offen, die in Deutschland und vielleicht auf dem ganzen Kontinent vorherrscht und die das muslimische Leben im Europa des 21. Jahrhunderts bestimmt.

Trotz enormer Fortschritte genießen die europäischen Muslime immer noch nicht das, was im historischen Kontext „Emanzipation“ genannt wird.

Kein demokratisch gesinnter Politiker in Deutschland leugnet, dass die Präsenz des Islam in Europa von Dauer sein wird. Aber während der Islam in der Öffentlichkeit demonstrativ willkommen geheißen wird, löst er zunehmend heftigen Widerstand bei den Nativisten aus, die von Muslimen einen Loyalitätsbeweis und mehr Integrationsbemühungen als Gegenleistungen für ihre Zugehörigkeit zur Gesellschaft einfordern. Islamkritischer Populismus ist längst nicht mehr nur an den Rändern des politischen Spektrums zu Hause. Dieser Populismus reißt eine Wunde wieder auf, die 1999 durch die Reform des Staatsangehörigkeitsrechts geschlossen werden sollte. Die neuen „Bindestrich-Deutschen“ sind frustriert angesichts der Grenzen, die ihrer Religionsfreiheit gesetzt werden und angesichts der Bigotterie im Kampf gegen den politischen und religiösen Extremismus.

Die Einbindung islamischer Organisationen und auch ihre Einbettung in bestehende gesellschaftliche Strukturen in Deutschland und Europa funktionieren zunehmend besser: Die Deutsche Islamkonferenz und ähnliche Gipfeltreffen von Politikern und Verbänden haben zu Hunderten neuer Gebetsräume und Gotteshäuser geführt, auch wenn viele davon noch im Bau sind. Ebenso positiv anzumerken sind die verbesserten Angebote religiöser Erziehung in Schulen und die immer größere Zahl von Imamen, Lehrern und Theologen, die im Land ausgebildet werden.

Der rechtliche und politische Status des Islam in Europa hingegen entzieht sich trotz aller Bemühungen einer Einordnung. Zwei Entwicklungen behindern seine Verankerung: Die Islamkritik in Europa verschiebt sich von der Betonung der Neutralität des öffentlichen Raumes und der Verteidigung westlicher Menschenrechtsvorstellungen hin zu einem generellen Unbehagen gegenüber allen muslimischen Glaubenspraktiken. Das wiederum ruft in den Herkunftsländern Beschützerinstinkte hervor, Ministerien werden geschaffen, um die religiösen, politischen und wirtschaftlichen Bande mit der Diaspora zu erhalten.

Das ist der Ausweg aus der falschen Dichotomie von Integration und Assimilation

Die Emanzipation in dem aufklärerischen Sinn dieses Wortes, den die preußischen Reformer Stein und Hardenberg meinten, bietet einen sicheren und realistischen Ausweg aus dem Dilemma: Den Eintritt einer zuvor ausgeschlossenen Gruppe in eine demokratische Gesellschaft, basierend auf bestehenden Gesetzen, mit den gleichen Rechten und Pflichten für alle Bürger. Emanzipation umfasst auch Kollektivrechte, falls diese Bürger sich entschließen, einer religiösen oder einer anderen Art von Gemeinschaft beizutreten. Natürlich waren damit immer auch Auflagen verbunden, wie solche zur Steuer- oder zur Wehrpflicht. Emanzipation ist ein ungleichmäßiger Prozess, der sich über mehrere Generationen hinzieht. Die Juden Frankreichs erhielten bereits im Jahr 1791 gleiche Rechte, wohingegen jene in Deutschland bis zur Reichsverfassung 1871 warten mussten. Ihm eigen war dabei schon immer eine Art doppelter Handschlag zwischen Staat und Religionsgemeinschaft: Mit der einen Hand sorgt der Staat für Gleichheit und erteilt Rechte. Mit der anderen erzwingt er Anpassung und eine Reform der Gemeindestrukturen.

Auf dem langen und schwierigen Weg der Demokratisierung im Europa des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts wurde von der politischen Teilhabe ausgeschlossenen Menschen – Juden, Katholiken, die Arbeiterklasse – nach und nach das volle Bürgerrecht gewährt. Ihnen wurde auch der Status „gesellschaftliche Gruppe“ zugestanden, sie konnten sich in Verbänden, Interessengruppen und Gewerkschaften organisieren, um institutionelle Privilegien wahrzunehmen und ihre Interessen innerhalb eines gesetzlich verankerten Rahmens zu vertreten.

Aber warum sollten wir heute noch den überkommenen Begriff „Emanzipation“ verwenden? Das Wort beschwört die Misserfolge der deutschen Demokratie herauf, dabei könnte es auch die lichten Momente des deutschen Demokratisierungsprozesses beleuchten. Zwölf Jahre „Drittes Reich“ sollten nicht die schon zuvor errungenen Fortschritte negieren.

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: Der Tagesspiegel

Image Source: © Thomas Peter / Reuters

Islam: The Long Way to Integration

Jonathan Laurence — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Summary: In an interview with ParisBerlin Magazine, Jonathan Laurence discusses the differences between the French and German Muslim immigrants and the divergent ways in which the peoples and governments of those two nations have responded to the change in their demographics.

Download the interview in German here (PDF) »

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Islam: The Long Way to Integration

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: ParisBerlin

Image Source: © Thomas Peter / Reuters

"No Bourgeoisie, No Democracy": Obama's Democratization Policy in the Middle East and North Africa (Nordafrika verdankt seine Revolutionen wesentlich den USA Obamas Genie)

Jonathan Laurence — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: In an article in Die Tageszeitung, Jonathan Laurence looks at democratization in the Middle East and North Africa, and how U.S. foreign policy has influenced political transtions in Arab states. Read the article in German.

The debate over the Obama administration’s handling of the democratic awakening in the Middle East is in full swing. In the final televised election campaign debate, President Obama portrayed his handling of the Arab spring as a foreign policy success. Governor Romney objected, saying he would have recognized the “passion for freedom” in the region long before it “exploded.”

The blunt talk in the Wikileaks diplomatic memorandums of kleptocratic and autocratic tendencies exposed a cynical pragmatism underlying American support for those regimes. But was that really news to anyone? The American foreign policy establishment had already recognized its collective dilemma in the 2000s: they knew that the situation with Mubarak and Ben Ali was no longer tenable and they wanted nonetheless to keep things as they were, or rather slowly easethem into retirement.

However, convinced that political stability was in danger, the Bush administration tried to force of hand of various Arab and North African governments: democratize or risk being toppled.

When Condoleezza Rice visited Cairo in 2005, she spoke about democratization as a condition for America’s continued funding. Her fellow Republican party members takeover of Congress in 2008 was an –unfulfilled—threat. Mubarak subsequently refused any future state visits from the USA. And the Obama administration? It agreed with their predecessors’ assessment but pursued a different strategy.

George Bush as Malcolm X

Obama’s genius consists in never directly going about regime change. In his Cairo speech in 2009 he said “no system of government can or should be imposed by one country on another country.” While George W. Bush was emulating Malcolm X—“democracy by any means necessary”—the President was moving in more of the tradition of Martin Luther King.

Obama knew that he might not reach the mountaintop, so instead he set about creating the right conditions to bring it within reach. This realism does not mean that America has abandoned its leadership role, it’s rather an acknowledgment the USA is not sitting alone behind the wheel.

In the early phase of the Arab Awakening, however, few observers ascribed the popular revolts to the long-awaited fruit of patient American nurturing. The American administration was accused of tout et son contraire: disbelief before the events in Tunisia, crossed wires between the White House and the State Department on Egypt policy, and passivity regarding Libya until the French and British governments cajoled the United States into military contributions.

Could the CIA have known?

One American official told the Times in 2011 that the CIA knew Egypt was in an “untenable” situation, but “we didn’t know what the triggering mechanism would be.” Another spoke of outright surprise: “We’ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the possibility that Egypt moves from stability to turmoil? None.”

Whereas Bush acted within a predictable rule-bound regional environment—albeit in the twilight of an authoritarian era—Obama has been dealt his hand from a deck of wild cards. Since 2009, however, Obama officials have shifted American policy away from a strategy of regime pressure and debates over foreign aid conditionality toward a wholehearted emphasis on indigenous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and economic growth in North Africa.

Policies supporting the voluntary and for-profit sectors existed under the previous American administration, but they were destined to languish as long as the old regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, or Libya remained in place. Civil society could not flourish without greater freedoms and democratic elections, just as economic development strategies driven by investment and loans could not thrive within conditions of crony capitalism.

Obama shifted public focus away from regime behavior in order to allow other aspects of the relationship to expand, for instance, through U.S. government-initiated civil society–private sector support in North Africa. This consisted not only in strengthening the Middle East Partnership Initiative, which will have distributed $300 million to civil society organizations and NGOs during his administration, but also the administration’s signature “Global Entrepreneurship Program” and “Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in the Muslim world,” hosted in April 2010 in Washington and including participants from all North African countries.

Strengthen the middle class

Through these efforts the administration embraced the view of historical sociologists: “no bourgeoisie, no democracy.” In other words, only a strengthened middle class with economic and political interests to protect would lead to parliamentary democracy. Well before the events of winter 2011, Obama highlighted “the importance of social and economic entrepreneurship, and strengthening mutually-beneficial relationships with entrepreneurs” in the region. He convened a U.S.-Maghreb Entrepreneurship Conference in support of private sector development held in Algeria and Istanbul. The White House sent a National Security Council Director to Algeria and Tunisia, who told local audiences that the United States sought to strengthen entrepreneurship as a way of deepening the relationship between American Muslim communities and entrepreneurs in Muslim majority countries. The administration created eight funds to promote science and technology in North Africa and expanded professional exchanges by more than 30 percent.

During the last televised debate with Mitt Romney, Obama clearly said again: “we will help Egypt develop its economy, because only then will the Revolution be a success.” In late September 2012 the USA reconfirmed debt relief, loans and military aid to Egypt—the total amounting to billions. The Europeans have done the same, though their aid package is significantly less. The new U.S. funds for the Middle East and North Africa comprise about 700 million U.S. dollars.

Many unanswered questions remain, of course, in light of the new Egyptian president and of Salafists who run amok in Libya and Tunisia. September’s events illustrate the dilemma: even if violent mobs attacked US embassies in Cairo and Tunis, we cannot barricade or shutter embassies in countries that are so closely tied to our national interests, but keeping them open comports its own set of risks.

Nordafrika verdankt seine Revolutionen wesentlich den USA Obamas Genie

Wer hat den Arabischen Frühling möglich gemacht? Der Streit um die Urheberschaft und die anschließende „Steuerung“ des demokratischen Aufbruchs im Nahen und Mittleren Osten ist im vollen Gange. Im letzten Fernsehduell des Wahlkampfs bemühte sich Präsident Obama, den Fall der Autokraten in Tunesien und Ägypten als seinen außenpolitischen Erfolg zu verbuchen. Herausforderer Romney lehnte diese Erzählung natürlich ab. Er hätte die „Freiheitspassion“ der Region anerkannt, längst bevor sie „explodiert“ wäre.

Das unverblümte Sprechen in den von Wikileaks ins Netz gestellten Memoranden der Diplomaten über die kleptokratischen und autokratischen Regime offenbarte den zynischen Pragmatismus, auf dem die amerikanische Unterstützung der Diktatoren in Nordafrika basierte. Aber konnte das überraschen? Das dem gesamten außenpolitischen Establishment gemeinsame Dilemma um 2000 herum war doch längst bekannt: Sie wussten, dass der Status mit Mubarak und Ben Ali nicht mehr zu halten war, und wollten sie trotzdem halten beziehungsweise nur langsam in die Rente zwingen.

Dennoch: Überzeugt davon, dass die politische Stabilität in Gefahr war, versuchte schon die Bush-Administration die verschiedenen arabischen und nordafrikanischen Regierungen in Zugzwang zu bringen: Demokratisiert euch oder ihr riskiert euren Untergang.

Als Condoleezza Rice 2005 Kairo besuchte, sprach sie von der Demokratisierung als Bedingung für Amerikas Weiterfinanzierung. Ihre republikanischen Parteikollegen übernahmen das bei ihrem Kongress 2008 als eine – nicht erfüllte – Drohung. Mubarak lehnte daraufhin künftige Staatsbesuche in den USA ab. Und die Obama-Administration? Sie teilt die Einschätzung ihrer Vorgänger, verfolgt jedoch eine andere Strategie.

George Bush wie Malcolm X

Obamas Genie besteht darin, den Regimewechsel nie direkt zu betreiben. In seiner Kairo-Rede 2009 sagte er: „Kein Regierungssystem kann oder sollte einem Land von irgendeinem anderen Land aufgezwungen werden.“ Während George W. Bush dem Beispiel von Malcolm X nacheiferte – Demokratie „mit allen nötigen Mitteln“ –, bewegt sich der Präsident eher in der Tradition von Martin Luther King.

Dieser war sich bewusst, die „Bergspitze“ vielleicht nicht zu erreichen, setzte aber die Rahmenbedingungen für den Gipfelsturm. Dieser Realismus bedeutet nicht, dass Amerika seine Führungsrolle aufzugeben gedenkt, sondern ist der Überzeugung geschuldet, dass die USA nicht mehr hinterm Steuer sitzen.

In der frühen Phase der arabischen Aufstände haben allerdings nur wenige Beobachter die Revolten als lang ersehnte Frucht einer geduldigen amerikanischen Demokratiepflege wahrgenommen. Die amerikanische Administration wurde vielmehr scharf kritisiert: Ungläubigkeit im Vorfeld von Tunesien, Missverständnisse zwischen Weißem Haus und Außenministerium beim Umgang mit Ägypten und schließlich Passivität gegenüber Libyen, und zwar so lange, bis die französischen und britischen Regierungen die USA endlich zu einem militärischen Beitrag überreden konnten.

Was wusste die CIA?

Ein amerikanischer Regierungsmitarbeiter sagte gegenüber einer Zeitung, die CIA habe gewusst, dass die Situation in Ägypten „unhaltbar“ war, „aber wir wussten nicht, welcher Faktor den Absturz auslösen würde“. Ein anderer sprach von einer kompletten Überraschung: „Wir hatten in Sachen Frieden im Mittleren Osten endlose Strategiesitzungen in den letzten zwei Jahren, wie wir mit dem Iran umgehen. Und wie viele von ihnen haben die Möglichkeit berücksichtigt, Ägypten könnte instabil werden? Keine einzige.“

Bush agierte noch in einer berechenbaren regionalen Umgebung – wenn auch im Zwielicht einer autoritären Ära. Obama hält ein Blatt mit lauter Unbekannten in den Händen. Seine Strategie seit 2009: weg vom Druck auf die Regime und den Diskussionen über die Bedingungen von ausländischer Hilfe, hin zu einer ehrlich gemeinten Unterstützung der heimischen NGOs und des wirtschaftlichen Wachstums in Nordafrika.

Die Unterstützung für For-Profit-Bereiche gab es auch bei der früheren amerikanischen Regierung, doch war sie eben an die alten Regime in Ägypten, Tunesien und Libyen gebunden. Die Zivilgesellschaft aber konnte ohne größere Freiräume und demokratische Wahlen nicht aufblühen. Genauso wenig entfalteten wirtschaftliche Entwicklungsstrategien, die auf Investment und Krediten basieren, in einer kapitalistischen Vetternwirtschaft die nötige Dynamik.

Präsident Obama legt den Schwerpunkt auf das Unternehmertum in der Welt der muslimischen Mehrheiten. In den vergangenen vier Jahren wurden in Nordafrika rund 300 Millionen Dollar in Organisationen der Zivilgesellschaft investiert. Zusätzlich fokussierte die Obama-Administration auf das „Global Entrepreneurship Program“ und den „Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in the Muslim World“, veranstaltet 2010 in Washington.

Die Mittelschicht stärken

Diese Initiativen basieren auf der Überzeugung: ohne Bourgeoisie keine Demokratie. Denn nur eine gestärkte Mittelschicht mit wirtschaftlichen und politischen Interessen kann zu einer parlamentarischen Demokratie führen.

Lange vor den Ereignissen von 2011 berief Obama eine US-Maghreb-Entrepreneurship-Konferenz in Algerien und Istanbul ein, um dort die mittelständische Privatwirtschaft zu unterstützen. Das Weiße Haus entsandte einen Spezialisten des Nationalen Sicherheitsrats (NSC) nach Algerien und Tunesien, der vor lokalem Publikum betonte, dass die USA den Mittelstand unterstützen wollten, um die Beziehungen zwischen muslimischen Communitys in den USA und in der muslimischen Welt auszubauen. Es wurden acht Fonds für Wissenschaft und Technologie eingerichtet und der professionelle Austausch von Experten und Wissenschaftler ermutigt.

Auch während der letzten Fernsehdebatte mit Mitt Romney sagte Obama erneut klar: „Wir helfen Ägypten bei der Entwicklung seiner Wirtschaft, weil ihre Revolution nur dann erfolgreich sein wird.“ Im späten September 2012 haben die USA den Schuldenerlass, die Kredite und die Militärhilfe für Ägypten – zusammen macht das Milliarden aus – erneut bestätigt. Die Europäer taten das Gleiche, auch wenn ihr Hilfspaket deutlich kleiner ausfällt. Die neuen US-Fonds für den Mittleren Osten und Nordafrika umfassen rund 700 Millionen US-Dollar.

Trotzdem bleiben viele offene Fragen, angesichts des neuen ägyptischen Präsidenten Mursi und von Salafisten, die in Libyen und Tunesien Amok laufen. Um nur einen Aspekt der jüngsten Vergangenheit zu nennen: Wie können wir die Rollläden in den Botschaften einfach runterlassen in Ländern, die so eng mit unseren nationalen Interessen verbandelt sind? Wie können wir die Botschaften offen halten, wenn sie von einem gewalttätigen Mob in Kairo oder Tunis angegriffen werden?

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: Die Tageszeitung

Image Source: © Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

A Risky Prospect: U.S.-European Military Cooperation under a Romney Presidency

Jonathan Laurence — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: This article first appeared on p.2 of the Süddeutsche Zeitung on October 15, 2012. Download the original version in German » (PDF)

In the first presidential debate of the U.S. election season, Governor Romney landed on the word “military” or “defense” in four of his last five sentences. Defense spending may be the one foreign policy difference where Romney believes he can get a toehold against a President who has restored foreign policy dominance to the Democratic party for the first time in decades. It is also the fundamental dimension where Republicans and Democrats disagree vis-à-vis our relationship with Europe.

How to spur Europeans to increase contributions to common military defense? Over the next ten years, Romney wants to spend $2.5 trillion more than Obama – that includes undoing the $487 billion Obama proposes cutting from the military budget. Around the time of last spring’s NATO summit, Mitt Romney wrote in the Chicago Tribune that the President’s “hollowing out” of the American military has discouraged Europeans from contributing more.

It’s important to remember the context in which these two men are allegedly so divided. American military preeminence is a matter of bipartisan consensus. The Romney-Obama foreign policy showdown comes down to questions like, do we need ten or eleven nuclear-powered aircraft carriers? Obama’s budget still includes room for 2,500 new fighter aircraft, and nine new ships a year -- Romney would build 15 a year for the Navy.

This is an ironic role reversal in which the “small government” candidate is urging a massive increase government spending, and it is a revealing exception to Governor Romney’s general aversion to Keynesian economics. Still, it’s hard to believe that the former business consultant sees no place to cut wasteful spending at the Pentagon.

President Obama’s unprecedented personal popularity in Western Europe was expected reap benefits from America’s traditional allies across the Atlantic. Early encouragement came in the form of the Nobel Prize. But as they say in DC, a Nobel Prize and a buck fifty will get you a cup of coffee. This good will hasn’t resulted in additional help in closing Guantanamo from European friends abroad. And Obama was not able to elicit much more military cooperation and support for Afghanistan, either. If you compare the NATO summit of 2012 to the one in December 2009, it’s hard to see much progress. In 2009, Europeans offered a modest increase of forces to accompany the last American surge in Afghanistan. In 2012 they offered some additional funding for training. But in general, the European contribution to NATO spending is down from one-half to one-third in the last ten years.

In truth, the exasperation that Washington has expressed with its European partners who ignored former Secretary Gates’ departing exhortation to spend a realistic budgetary percentage on defense – has now turned to resignation. But as Libyan intervention showed, other models of cost sharing are conceivable. And it’s more credible for us to ask for that contribution if we are tightening our own belt. Cooperation with European partners in Libya gives an example of President Obama’s new deal with his longtime partners. It turns out you get more bees with less honey. The U.S. spent around $896 million dislodging Qaddafi, France spent half that and the U.K. actually spent more than the U.S.: at least 850 million pounds. Compare that to the $900 billion the U.S. spent in Iraq – admittedly a more complex task sought out by the Bush administration. The U.K. spent only roughly $15 billion there from 2003-10.

What matters even more than budget quibbling is the fundamental question of which circumstances justify military action. It’s there that Romney is broadly considered perilous for the transatlantic relationship. His sabre rattling in the direction of Russia, Iran and Palestine reminds many European politicians and publics of the days of the first G.W. Bush term. At first blush, it is hard to imagine enhanced transatlantic cooperation on most foreign policy issues currently on the agenda. Romney would re-set the reset with Russia; he would not have signed START because of limitations on U.S. military planning. Romney says wouldn’t have announced a 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan. On Climate change, Romney still insists on “the lack of scientific consensus” on the source of CO2 emissions.

In the case of Georgia, Romney’s advisors advocated escalation when they were advising John McCain. It’s hard to imagine they’d act differently now, especially now that they have designated Russia as our number one geopolitical foe. The current peaceful transition of power in Georgia was enabled in part by cool-headed diplomacy. Many European countries prefer a subtler approach with Russia that is not unnecessarily confrontational.

As for the famous Asian pivot – and by extension, the turn away from Europe – it never materialized. If the U.S. is always ready to fight wars on two fronts, President Obama has demonstrated that the U.S. can also maintain allies and trading partners on more than one continent. No one dares ignore the economic rise of Asia. Chancellor Merkel had a recently successful trip to China, and European production as a share of gross world product is expected to continue declining.

The Obama administration has been quite engaged in Europe: Secretary Clinton has visited once a month on average. Obama himself made ten visits to Europe. A recent ARD/DeutschlandTrend poll showed 75% job approval ratings for President Obama, with just 16% disapproving; 86% said they would reelect the President, whereas only 7% would do so for Romney. The German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Trends tell a similar story: the President maintains more than two-thirds approval across Europe, a figure which would be the envy of many European heads of government.

The transatlantic relationship has matured from working with Europe “on” Europe -- free and whole – to a phase in which it is being harnessed for leverage in other pressing areas, from the Arab Spring to Libya, Syria and Iran – putting forth a fairly unified front in spite of high complexity and some competing national interests.

It’s hard to imagine that Romney’s $2.5 trillion spending difference with Obama will inspire Europeans to suddenly invest more in collective defense. Rather, cooperation would likely stall. Does this matter? According to a recent ABC/Washington Post poll, American voters are more concerned about the economy by about 50 to 1.

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: Süddeutsche Zeitung

Image Source: © Jason Reed / Reuters

France's Hollande Seeks Reset in Post-Arab Spring Maghreb

Jonathan Laurence — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

When crowds of protesters from Tunis to Cairo ignited what would become the Arab Spring in January 2011, it caught the government of then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy off guard. François Hollande, already campaigning to replace Sarkozy as president, saw an opening in Sarkozy’s initial hesitation and quickly promised to distinguish himself from his opponent’s “silence,” “incoherence” and “contradictory” diplomacy to restore French influence in the region. The demonstrations and uprisings in the Arab world allowed Hollande to draw attention away from the global financial crisis, where Sarkozy had staked his electoral argument for continuity, and toward North Africa, where France had lost both prestige and exports on Sarkozy’s watch.

Now president, Hollande will make his first state visit to an Arab country, Algeria, this December, marking the culmination of his effort to restore France’s standing in a region that is being actively courted by the United States and China. The visit also underscores the differences between Hollande’s approach to regional diplomacy and that of his predecessor.

Five years ago, Sarkozy came to power promising an end to “Françafrique,” shorthand for the cozy postcolonial relations between Paris and autocratic rulers in Northern and sub-Saharan Africa. However, Sarkozy demonstrated little interest in France’s former colonies and had no patience for their demands that Paris apologize and provide reparations for its colonial legacy. He hastily convened a Mediterranean Union under French leadership, but the project lacked clarity of purpose. The proposed union was half aspirational -- it included Israel -- and half realist, with figures such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali playing key roles. Sarkozy soon pivoted away from the Maghreb and invested in bilateral courtship of the Persian Gulf countries instead. After stumbling through the outset of the Arab Spring, he played a high profile and vocal role in catalyzing support for the NATO intervention in Libya last year.

Read the full article »

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: World Politics Review

Image Source: © Philippe Wojazer / Reuters

Wrong Signals on Religious Rights in Germany

Jonathan Laurence — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400

The Cologne court's decision to halt non-medical circumcisions earlier this summer marks a new low for religious freedom in 21st century Europe. It is the latest dip in a slippery slope that began with the condemnation of burkas and other forms of extremism but has landed squarely in the mainstream of religious practice.

In January, Dutch MPs called Islamic headscarves "a symbol of oppression." Months later, the French Prime Minister suggested rethinking "ancestral traditions that are out of sync with the modern era," such as ritual animal slaughter.

After the Cologne ruling, hospitals in Switzerland and Austria also suspended circumcisions. Last month, a Norwegian official proposed raising to fifteen the minimum age at which a boy may undergo the procedure – in direct contravention of Muslim and Jewish rites.

Ironically, these debates have sharpened at the very moment when European countries, led by Germany, had begun to make space for its newest citizens’ "ancestral traditions" alongside their own. As in neighboring countries, the German government realized it couldn't do without a legitimate administrative partner if it was to assure the same rights – and corresponding state oversight – enjoyed by other recognized religions practiced by German citizens. Before the establishment of state-mosque relations, expansion of religious rights for Muslims in Germany happened largely in the courts, an arduous and time-consuming process that took for granted an adversarial administration.

Through institutions like the Deutsche Islam Konferenz (DIK), federal and local authorities have assumed ownership of state-mosque relations. To Chancellor Merkel's credit, the DIK is arguably Europe's most successful example of its kind. Its six years in existence have sent a strong signal to the real protagonists of religious integration under the constitution – local administrators – to engage and incorporate Islamic associations in their own cities and towns. As a result, for example, North-Rhine-Westphalia implemented large-scale Islamic education in public schools and Hamburg concluded an historic concordat with its Muslim communities.

At this moment of generational change, however, public debate has not helped observant Muslims blend into their new institutional contexts. Politicians perpetuate commonplaces and manufacture debates, ranging from the claim Muslims engage in willful deceit, to accusations of child endangerment or animal torture. Far-right groups repeatedly taunt mosque-goers with the prophet cartoons that caricature Muhammad, sometimes provoking major urban unrest.

Questioning whether Islam "belongs to Germany” is nowhere near the same register as "unerwünscht" of the bad old days. Nor does it represent much progress in the decades since "Deutschland ist kein Einwanderungsland" or "Kinder statt Inder." These slogans contribute to the perception of a hostile state and society that Muslim minorities are being asked to "integrate" into with a smile.

Despite the importance of robust debate to a well-functioning diverse society, the circumcision moratorium signifies a qualitatively different threat. Unlike the case of head coverings or halal meat, opposition isn't motivated by fears of conquest or the desire to consign religion to the "private sphere" (It's hard to think of a more discreet profession of faith.) Instead, the ban signals a frontal attack on the religion itself – and like the proposed restrictions on halal slaughter, it ensnares Jews as well.

State by state, prominent outsiders are being enlisted to reach a compromise that would allow for circumcisions under tighter regulation. And it is not unreasonable to assume that religious practices will continue to evolve as a function of place and circumstance, if the precedent of 19th century Judaism provides a glimpse of what to expect. Many Muslims in the West have started donating to charity instead of carrying out ritual slaughter at feast time. The sightings of the moon that set Ramadan's start and end are increasingly likely to rely on European measurements. European Muslims have begun theological doctorates at local universities, and imams have a greater familiarity with local languages and mores. Still, the implicit correlation between proposed religious reforms and social integration is tendentious: the real contest lies elsewhere, in schools and on the job market.

Opponents to mainstream Islamic and Jewish practices often couch their intentions in laudable terms, mobilizing on behalf of free speech and women's or animal rights. However, they undermine religious rights guaranteed by the same constitution they brandish. This hardens positions and politicizes religious practices.

Most damaging of all, they weaken the movement to synthesize "ancestral" and European state traditions embodied by the participants of Islam councils like the DIK. This places religious leadership in the unenviable position between the "hammer" of the State and the "anvil" of Community. If current trends prevent them from delivering basic religious freedoms to their constituents, what's to keep European Muslims from searching elsewhere for a more aggressive brand of advocacy?

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: Der Tagesspiegel

Image Source: © Vincent Kessler / Reuters

La capacité des Européens à façonner une relation stable entre l’État et l’islam est essentielle

Jonathan Laurence — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: In an interview about his new book The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims with the French newspaper La Croix, Jonathan Laurence argues that the European capacity to facilitate a stable relationship between the state and Islam is essential.

Professeur à Boston, Jonathan Laurence a mené, de 1998 à 2011, une étude comparative dans quatre pays européens sur la manière dont sont structurées les relations entre l’État et « la mosquée ».

Quels sont les enjeux de ces instances représentatives de l’islam pour les musulmans eux-mêmes et pour les États ?

Jonathan Laurence: L’institutionnalisation des relations entre l’État et la mosquée est aussi inévitable que souhaitable, des deux côtés. Plusieurs millions de personnes d’origine musulmane vivent en Europe : l’enracinement de leur culte dans les institutions locales et nationales est dans l’intérêt de tous. Une instance représentative est le complément naturel d’une pleine citoyenneté.

Par ailleurs, un État ne peut se passer d’un partenaire administratif légitime pour accorder à l’islam les mêmes droits – et le même contrôle – qu’aux autres religions. Retarder cette étape a des conséquences très concrètes : la multiplication des expressions religieuses dans l’espace public, qui peut alimenter la perception publique d’un échec de l’intégration et un cycle d’incompréhensions mutuelles.

Pourquoi avez-vous choisi ces quatre pays – France, Grande-Bretagne, Allemagne et Italie – pour votre enquête ? Quelles différences et ressemblances entre eux ?

À eux quatre, ils couvrent les principales sources de flux de migrants d’origine musulmane en Europe de l’Ouest. Tous observent chez eux la générosité de la Ligue islamique mondiale (créée par l’Arabie saoudite), mais aussi l’islam exporté d’Algérie, du Maroc, du Pakistan ou de la Turquie, ainsi que les trois grandes branches de l’islam politique actuel : le Tabligh, Mili Görus et les Frères musulmans. Et tous se sont dotés, au tournant des années 2000, d’un conseil représentatif de l’islam, certains plus décentralisés que d’autres, certains associant musulmans et personnalités qualifiées non musulmanes…

La plupart ont souffert d’instabilité chronique et de sous-productivité. Mais la faute est partagée : d’un côté, on demande aux organisations musulmanes à la fois de démontrer leur malléabilité face aux pouvoirs publics et de conserver la légitimité de la rue et, ce, alors qu’elles n’ont pas à être démocratiquement élues : aucun autre interlocuteur cultuel ne l’est.

De l’autre, l’État doute de sa capacité à avoir prise sur les branches les plus extrêmes et donc les exclut du dialogue. Il doit avoir confiance dans ses institutions qui, par le passé, ont déjà démontré leur capacité à «digérer » des mouvements radicaux, d’extrême gauche par exemple, et à accompagner leur évolution.

Quel bilan dressez-vous de ces expériences ? Quelles sont les raisons de leurs succès et échecs ?

Ces conseils ont déjà porté quelques fruits quant à la « domestication » et la banalisation de l’islam : de la nomination d’aumôniers pour l’armée ou les prisons à la création de formation pour les enseignants de religion à l’école ou à la signature de « chartes de valeurs ». Même si la formation locale des imams reste insuffisante, la préparation des candidats au départ de Rabat ou d’Ankara s’est répandue, tout comme les séminaires d’acclimatation à l’arrivée.

Toutefois, ces instances représentatives ne trouveront leur équilibre que si les États-nations démontrent leur volonté de filtrer les influences étrangères sur leurs citoyens. La « citoyennisation » de l’islam européen – qui est l’objectif – ne sera complète que lorsque les communautés locales parviendront à former et à payer leurs imams et à construire leurs mosquées.

En attendant, la solution relève plutôt de la logique du pansement : des accords diplomatiques perdurent entre États européens et pays d’origine pour importer mosquées et personnels religieux. Et les gouvernements européens continuent à sous-traiter les détails de l’observance religieuse aux représentants de l’Algérie, de Turquie, d’Arabie saoudite ou du Maroc, ce qui retarde le processus de création d’un « islam européen »…

Dans cette période critique de tumultes dans le monde arabe, la contribution des Européens à l’émergence d’une relation stable entre l’État et l’islam est capitale : « les absents ont toujours tort ».

Recueilli par Anne-Bénédicte Hoffner

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: La Croix

Why Is It So Hard for the French to Say Sorry to Algeria

Jonathan Laurence — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

As Algeria kicks off festivities for the 50th anniversary of its independence from France this week, all eyes are on the former colonial power's new president, François Hollande. Nine countries asked to join the party in Algiers — including the United States, which conveyed American gratitude to three-term President Abdelaziz Bouteflika for Algeria's "key role" in global counterterrorism and regional security. The French government sent no representatives to the opening ceremony, held in Algiers on July 5, but said that Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius would travel there soon to advance a late-summer visit by Hollande, raising expectations that a turning point is near in the prickly post-colonial relationship.

Some anticipate that Hollande could become the first French president to apologize formally for more than a century of colonization and hundreds of thousands of war dead beteen 1830 to 1962. Officials in Algiers say a full and frank apology is long overdue. Should they expect normalization of Franco-Algerian relations from a leader who billed himself in the campaign as "président normal" — in stark contrast to his predecessor, the frenetic Nicolas Sarkozy?

Hollande is the first French president with an explicitly post-colonial mindset. He was 10 weeks old when Algeria's National Liberation Front (FLN) took up arms against French occupation. His predecessor, Sarkozy, may be a year younger, but during his presidency he had no time for what he called "eternal repentance." And his party colleagues in parliament even passed a law praising colonialism's "positive role."

Hollande, on the other hand, has long been on conciliatory and friendly terms with Algeria. As a student, he interned in the French embassy there in 1978, and he returned to Algiers as a guest of the ruling FLN while he was Socialist Party secretary in 2006, where he was granted a lengthy meeting with Bouteflika. Two weeks after declaring his presidential candidacy in December 2010, Hollande returned to meet with the father of Algerian independence, Ahmed Ben Bella.

Read the rest of the article in Foreign Policy.

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: Foreign Policy

Image Source: Louafi Larbi / Reuters

Islam’s Place in Europe

Jonathan Laurence — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Last month saw a series of riots in Europe, not over the wobbly Euro, but instead over the integration of Muslim Europeans and immigrants. In Bonn, hundreds of German Muslims clashed with police in a violent reaction to a far-right political party’s anti-Muslim gathering. The angry young men who chanted “God is Great” while battling police in the streets have reignited the ongoing debate over Islam’s place in Europe, a debate which has risen to the top of many politicians’ concerns. The German president said in a newspaper interview that while German Muslims clearly “belong” to the country, it is less clear whether or not Islam does.

But something arguably much more meaningful, if less newsworthy, took place days later. Groups representing hundreds of thousands of German Muslims condemned the violence and called on constituents to fulfill the civic duty of voting in regional elections that month.

Extremists such as the Salafist sympathizers who rioted are a miniscule fraction of this minority population: security services estimate their number in the low thousands, out of around 4.3 million Muslims in Germany. But as the French Salafist murderer of Toulouse proved in March, even very few of them can have a ruinous effect. Above all, they are a painful reminder of an era when European governments – in denial that Muslims would settle permanently – ignored who was doing the teaching and preaching of Islam on their territories.

Read the full article at cnn.com »

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: CNN

Image Source: Ina Fassbender / Reuters

Le changement, c'est maintenant? The 2012 French Presidential Elections in Perspective

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:00:00 -0400

Event Information

April 16, 2012
9:00 AM - 12:30 PM EDT

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036

The first round of the French presidential elections will take place on April 22, with a runoff election on May 6. These elections hold high stakes not only for the nation itself, but also for the future of Europe and transatlantic relations. Moreover, they come at a particularly difficult time when leaders across Europe must balance resolving the financial crisis with restoring economic growth. Five years after current President Nicolas Sarkozy was elected on a program of "rupture" and bold reforms, he remains a controversial figure and faces a strong challenge from Socialist candidate François Hollande.

On April 16, the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings (CUSE) and the Heinrich Boell Foundation hosted a discussion previewing the elections and the current state of France. Panelists included Christopher Caldwell of the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Laurence of Boston College and a Brookings nonresident senior fellow, Jonah Levy of the University of California, Berkeley, and Brookings Senior Fellow Justin Vaïsse, CUSE director of research. They took a closer look at the candidates and their platforms, the impact of wedge issues such as immigration and Islam, the politics of the euro crisis and the implications for U.S foreign policy and transatlantic relations. Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

After the program, panelists took audience questions.

Transcript

Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

20120416_french_elections

Participants

Panelists

Jim Hoagland

Columnist
The Washington Post

Christopher Caldwell

Senior Editor
The Weekly Standard

Jonathan Laurence

Associate Professor, Boston College
Nonresident Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution

Jonah Levy

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
University of California, Berkeley

Marseille's Charmed Life May Not Last: Reaction to Shootings in Toulouse, France

Jonathan Laurence — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

The murders in Toulouse this week make France the third European country, after Norway and Germany, to confront the serial murder of minority citizens in the past year. Toulouse, which added 2 percent population annually since 1999, has now experienced the nightmare scenario of a city that is choking on its own newfound diversity.

These factors are absent in the port city of Marseille, which has a long history of serving as a crossroads of Mediterranean cultures. For half a century, it has had the largest Jewish and Muslim populations outside of Paris, making the city, by some estimates, almost 10 percent Jewish and 20 percent Muslim. Moreover, these figures have remained stable. Marseille’s population fell by 12 percent between 1975 and 1990 – losing more than 100,000 residents – before stagnating in the past decade at around 840,000.

Despite its demographic mix, the city’s population became famous for its tolerance – partly because there has rarely been a purely “majority” majority to begin with. When four other cities in the same region of Provence voted for National Front mayors in the mid-1990s, during a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, Marseille elected a centrist who had once defeated the party's founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in a regional election.

The city’s neighborhoods are relatively calm. In a country with 42,000 cases of auto arson a year, it makes the news when a single car goes up in flames in Marseille. The city didn’t receive the brunt of anti-Semitic violence that coincided with the second intifada in 2000 and 2001, and when 300 cities and towns experienced major rioting in 2005, Marseille had only light disturbances. The city vaunts its racially and religiously diverse soccer team, and local elected officials of immigrant background.

What is the secret? One may be that the city’s minorities live within city limits, often side-by-side with the native population. Being bounded by the Mediterranean on one side and mountains on the other helps contain urban sprawl. That has imposed meaningful limitations on the unintended consequences of bad urban planning elsewhere in France, and living in the city, not the suburban banlieues, naturally enhances integration. One study found French children of North African parentage in Marseille three times as likely to have friends of a different ethnic background as anywhere else in France.

The city became known for its ambience of “hope” – Marseille Espérance is the name of a well-known interreligious association. In the summer of 2001, the mayor proposed building a “grand mosque.” Even the Islamic federations that compete for seats on the local Regional Council for the Muslim Religion are unusually cooperative with one another and with local authorities, reaching across sectarian and ideological lines while their headquarters in Paris bicker and stonewall. Marseille’s Muslims choose from seven halal abattoirs during Eid al-Adha. Muslims have 73 prayer spaces, including 10 in the city center.

The city has not escaped all of the recent tensions, however, and the poverty of many neighborhoods contributes to the potential for urban unrest. In 2002, Mideast violence skipped across the Mediterranean, leading to the arson and destruction of Or Aviv synagogue (later rebuilt). In the fall of 2006, 10 buses were attacked by vandals throwing Molotov cocktails. Revealingly, the only victim to be hospitalized was a passenger of recent immigrant origin.

As Muslims became less popular in France, Marseille’s mayor quietly let his “grand mosque” plans drop. French researchers today emphasize the unequal outcomes in education and employment enjoyed by non-Muslims and Muslims. This month, a local official forbade women to wear a headscarf when getting married, and Marine Le Pen held a rally in Marseille mocking the president’s inability to impose law and order. When the interior minister visited Marseille, he warned against foreigners’ attempts to impose halal foods in school cafeterias.

Recent events have shifted everyone one position to the right. The mayor left his center-right party to join the Union for a Popular Movement in 2002, and that party's current boss has been ambiguous about whether it should combat the ideas of the Front National. Marseille in 2012 bears some of these scars of fear and mistrust, and its model may not be able to resist national currents for much longer.

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: The New York Times (Room for Debate blog)

Europe's Failure to Integrate Muslims

Jonathan Laurence — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Eight years have passed since France's Assemblee Nationale launched the opening volley of a decade-long effort to reduce Islam's visibility within migrant-origin communities across Europe. In the last few months alone, an anti-burqa law was passed in the Netherlands, a new headscarf bill and restrictions on halal slaughter are under consideration in France, and a German Supreme Court ruling banned Muslim prayer in public schools.

As Muslims and non-Muslims despair about the prospect of long-term Islamic integration in 21st century Europe, disagreement over the urgency and necessity to restrict Islamic symbols in the public sphere - from clothing to architecture and food - is at the origin of a potentially grave misunderstanding.

Religion is not the primary factor of identity for most European Muslims, but the current atmosphere has enhanced a feeling of group stigmatisation and a shared sense of injustice where previously few bonds existed. This has fed a growing confrontation, foreshadowed in two competing narratives of victimisation dividing Muslims from non-Muslims in Europe, which continue to gain strength.

In the first narrative, "native" European populations are told by political parties that many mainstream Muslim religious practices - from headscarves to halal meat - are in fact insidious attempts to impose Islamic rules on non-Muslims and they must be halted. As the Norwegian right-wing terrorist manifesto unoriginally put it, the year is 1683 and the Gates of Vienna are under siege.

Against this narrative is the view, held by many Muslim community leaders, that European governments are uniformly repressive and intolerant of diversity. In that account, it is not 1683 but 1938 all over again. Prohibitions against mainstream religious symbols (minarets and headscarves) as well as less common practices (burqas, polygamy and forced marriages) are a harbinger of worse to come.

In reality, the relevant analogy is not 1683 Vienna or 1938 Berlin, but rather several crucial nation-building moments in between. In what are mundane but arguably critical domains for religious integration - such as mosque construction, the training of imams, chaplains, the availability of halal food and visas for the hajj - Muslim communities and European governments have begun to talk and to act in the Islam councils coming into existence across the continent. Thanks to the public nature of these consultations, Islam is no longer a black box to the general electorate.

This bears repeating in light of recent legislative efforts that adumbrate what Europeans already know well: Formal legal equality is not everything and emancipation is not irreversible. There is the growing danger that the modest accomplishments of religious integration will be undone before Muslims' incorporation has taken place. Europe's Muslims increasingly perceive the sum total of public debate about them as simple religious persecution - an uncanny admixture of the political distrust that drove the Kulturkampf and the religious resentment that fuelled traditional anti-Semitism.

In Germany, headscarf ban on public employees led one newspaper to run the headline "Mit Kopftuch nur als Putzfrau" (If you wear a headscarf, you can only be a cleaning lady), suggesting that the government was trying to keep Muslim women in menial labour positions. After the German high court's decision to ban Muslim prayer in public school, one German Muslim federation said that authorities were "trying to drive the Islamic religion out of all public spaces". The 1930s are also on the mind of Muslims elsewhere in Europe. Last year, a former presidential adviser in France called on fellow Muslims to start wearing a "green star" and when the French parliament considered a new headscarf ban, petitioners against the bill made explicit reference to the Nuremberg laws.

Self-defeating Laws

The tide of restrictions shows little sign of receding. Their pursuit is too electorally rewarding - and too politically risky to oppose. This is a path on which many politicians find rewards, but it is on a slippery incline. Few observers contest the danger of Islamic fundamentalism or its deadly consequences. But if the obsession with Islamic symbols formed part of a coherent national security agenda, it would be complemented by trust-building measures in one of the few areas where the state has real power to influence outcomes, for example guaranteeing religious liberty under the rule of law. Instead, a disproportionate focus on cases of extreme piety or excessive religious modesty has produced one self-defeating legislative measure after another.

Take the headscarf and burqa restrictions that have been endorsed to date. Their implementation will impact directly only hundreds or perhaps thousands of families at most, less than one per cent of the many millions in the countries where parliaments passed them. The few women living under the weight of burqas in countries with new prohibitions, furthermore, will now be banished to their apartments. The handful of girls forced to choose between their faith and a public education will rarely encounter their non-Muslim peers in a neutral setting. As for discussions of restricting halal slaughter, this will affect little other than the ability of Islamic federations to raise funds locally. Suitable meat would just be imported and there would be no diminishment of the foreign cash needed to fund local religious associations.

Those who would impose limits on Islam's presence in the public sphere have gone, in the space of a decade, from banning headscarves on behalf of women's rights to the questioning of basic practices of religious toleration, such as the right to ritual animal slaughter, or the construction of houses of worship, with or without a minaret. In Milan, when the Deputy Mayor attended a Ramadan break-fast last August, she was accused by her predecessor of "sending the wrong institutional signal" and of seeking "equality for Islam as a religion", which would lead straight to Sharia law.

While the best intentions of secularists, liberals, feminists or animal welfare activists are often at work in the formulation of these measures, their net effect is to sacrifice golden opportunities to impart republican values in a shared setting. And the impression remains that these advocates' passions are less stirred by the illiberalism of non-Muslims. The pursuit of progressive social and political causes, such as women's rights, animal welfare and free speech, can take on discriminatory overtones if they are not pursued with similar alacrity to bring reform to non-Muslim religious groups.

The Wind and the Sun

In July 1917, the former American president William Howard Taft gave a speech pondering the fate of Europe's Jewish minorities as the United States joined the Great War. Calling for the unqualified emancipation of Jews and for their integration into every last national community in Europe, Taft warned that "harsh and repressive measures have not helped" and worse, are "always harmful". Taft didn't appeal to the legacy of Enlightenment or even the American and French Revolutions to bolster his argument. He cited Aesop's fable of the contest between the wind and the sun in removing a man's coat from his back. The harder the wind blew, the closer the man held the coat to his body. Likewise, Taft wrote, "persecution and injustice merely strengthen the Jew's peculiarity in his adherence to his ancient customs, religion and its ceremonials".

His solution amounts to a Victorian aphorism - persuasion is superior to force - but that does not lessen the wisdom of the 7th century BCE: "It was only when the sun with its warm rays increased the temperature and created discomfort that the man removed his coat." Taft's counsel continues to resonate today. Populist gesticulation around headwear, street prayer or halal food cannot substitute for serious strategies of socio-political inclusion.

If European leaders don't step up to this challenge, finally, someone else will. There is a new pack of suitors on the continent. Qatar recently stepped into the French banlieues with a gift of €50m ($65m) investment and the courting of French Muslim elites. The ancestral nations of many European Muslims, especially Turkey and Morocco, have also intensified their outreach efforts. They've built elaborate institutions and consultative mechanisms of their own to stay in touch with and to protect what they consider to be increasingly vulnerable minorities. Even the US has developed programmes that aim to enhance the integration of European Muslims.

These other countries are wooing European Muslim elites into their orbits because they're often the only ones taking them seriously. If things continue like this, European governments will waste the opportunity to capitalise on recent political sacrifices and progress made in the name of integration and regress to an era before they began to take responsibility for their own citizens.

Once all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked - the last burqa banned, the last foreign extremist deported - European governments will still need to raise their game and forge consensus on the far more critical and hard-to-reach goal: A coherent integration policy that engages full constitutional rights and responsibilities for all citizens. For now, party competition and unfavourable public opinion seem to have convinced many European governments that those grapes are sour.

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: Al Jazeera

Don't Be Fooled: Integration in Germany is Making Progress

Jonathan Laurence — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:56:00 -0400

With his highly selective summary of a 700- page integration report—focusing on the one in four "non-German Muslims" who resist majority society—Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich confirmed his pattern of expressing skepticism about Muslim integration in Germany.

From the moment Friedrich took office, he updated the 1990s conservatives mantra that "Germany is not a country of immigration" for the post-citizenship reform era by arguing that Islam did not truly "belong" to Germany. He thereby inserted himself in a decades-long tradition of conservative politicians in denial of the country's ethno-religious diversity.

Germany is lacking the mainstream political leaders who can take away the punchbowl of nationalism and assume the adult role of informing the German public that they are now a diverse society. The new nationality law may mean that most Turkish-Germans would be born with German citizenship from 2000 onwards, but German politicians have still not fully digested the implications of cultural diversity that follow from that reform.

Diversity Deniers

Friedrich is the latest in a line of diversity deniers who have preferred to wear blinders rather than break the news to the German electorate. These politicians share a basic refusal to accept that the categories of Muslims and German might not be mutually exclusive.

The views of Hans-Peter Friedrich have a long pedigree that crosses partisan lines. They don't appear so different from those of Thilo Sarrazin, the former federal banker who argued that migrant stock was "dumbing down" the country, and who said he felt justified by the recent study.

Sarrrazin, in turn, had significant overlap with former CSU Interior Minister Günther Beckstein in Bavaria, who was an ideological successor to the former Berlin/Brandenburg Interior Minister Jörg Schönbohm.

This national kabuki surrounding the place of Islam in German identity, however, is increasingly belied by a number of encouraging trends in German Muslims' citizenship and institutional integration.

Positive Development

Oddly, the transfer of a Turkish-German prisoner to Düsseldorf last month may turn out to be a far more meaningful event for the future of Turkish-Germans in the Federal Republic. The family of Murat Kaya, a Turkish German sentenced to four years in a Serbian prison, sought the aid of German authorities to allow him to serve his term at home in Germany - and against expectations, their wishes were granted.

The Kaya family had reason to despair. Germany's track record of offering diplomatic protection and claiming "ownership" of Turkish-Germans in the pre-citizenship era had been mixed.

The 1998 Bavarian deportation of "Mehmet," a 14-year-old juvenile delinquent raised in Germany, who spoke only German and who was sent "home" to Turkey, seemed to illustrate perfectly the country's ambivalence toward this minority.

Kurnaz Saga

Turkish-Germans growing up in the decade after "Mehmet" then witnessed the saga of Murat Kurnaz, born and raised in Bremen, who spent five years in American custody (mostly at Guantanamo) after being arrested but never charged on terrorism suspicions.

Shortly after Kurnaz's release in 2006, Green Party chairman Cem Özdemir met with the vindicated Bremen resident and asked in (news magazine) Der Spiegel: "Would it have been possible to get Kurnaz out of Guantanamo sooner?"

Generations spent as "native-born foreigners" intensified the feeling that institutional life lay beyond reach, becoming a self-fulfilling obstacle to Muslims' political integration in Europe.

But the six years since Murat Kurnaz returned to Germany from Guantanamo have seen vast changes in the institutional integration of Turkish-Germans, from the extension of full consular representation to the accommodation of Islamic religious requests alongside other recognized communities.

This time, German federal authorities fought hard to convince Serbians to transfer Murat Kaya to Germany, including making arguments about required medical attention. A publicity campaign by a major regional news outlet contributed to public pressure.

The Milli Görus federation, an Islamist group that seeks ties with German authorities, greeted the news with gratitude for officials' extensive efforts on Mr. Kaya's behalf: "The Justice and Foreign Ministries have sent a strong and positive signal to people with a foreign background. Such signs build trust and strengthen the feeling of togetherness."

Institutional Inclusion

This episode is the latest demonstration of the important role played by gestures of institutional inclusion that German governments have undertaken for the past six years, from the Chancellor's integration summit to the Interior Ministry's German Islam Conference, from local schools making space for Islam within their religious curriculum, to universities training theologians and religion teachers.

Since policy competency over religion falls under local state control - not Berlin's - progress is most visible at the local level. The end of 2011 proved to be particularly eventful. Germany's most populous state (North Rhine-Westphalia) recently announced it would offer Islamic instruction in 130 schools, alongside existing religious classes, for the state's roughly 320,000 Muslim public school students.

This fall, the first class of German Muslim theologians began doctoral studies at four different universities. The University of Tübingen launched a new teacher-training program for instructors of Islamic religion, while Osnabrück University has stepped up its efforts to provide supplementary training to imams for a German context.

Local Efforts

Two local state-mosque forums - inspired by the German Islam Conference - also recently saw the light of day. First, the 40 participants in Baden-Württemberg's "Islam Roundtable" discussed Islam's public image, education, basic liberties, and gender roles and "concrete measures to improve the integration of Muslims and Islam in Baden-Württemberg."

And second, the government in North Rhine-Westphalia initiated the "Islam Dialogue Forum," chaired by the local integration minister, to "intensify and improve the dialogue and cooperation with Muslims and Muslim organizations" that will address integration, education, and inter-religious dialogue.

There are now no fewer than three state-government level ministers in German Länder who are of Turkish origin: Bilkay Önay in Baden-Württemberg, Aygül Özkan in Lower Saxony and Dilek Kolat in Berlin.

The recent arrival on the scene of these three up and coming political stars is a solid rebuke to anyone who thought Cem Özdemir's success was a flash in the pan of German "diversity politics." (Adding to Turkish-German pride, Foreign Policy named Özdemir one of its top 100 global thinkers.)

Who would have guessed, so soon after Thilo Sarrazin's anti-immigrant best-seller "Germany Does Away with Itself," the endless debates about whether Islam is "from" Germany or not, and then the recent revelation of a gruesome series of neo-nazi murders of Turkish-German residents that daily political integration is going better than expected?

Lamenting Wulff

The national and Land-level governments and Muslim organizations are getting to know one another better, and community leaders are being drawn into a context that encourages their continued adaptation to life as a minority in Europe.

Perhaps it's no wonder that German Muslims lamented the recent resignation of German President Christian Wulff, who defied his Christian Democratic party colleagues by declaring that "Islam belongs to Germany."

Muslim groups across the political spectrum spoke out on his behalf to say: "Hey, that's Our President."

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: Deutsche Welle

France's Beef with Islam

Jonathan Laurence — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:01:00 -0500

The French, as no one really needs to be reminded, take their food pretty seriously. So perhaps it shouldn't have been shocking that recent revelations that the country's halal butchers have been quietly selling their surplus to non-halal distributors has emerged as a hot-button presidential campaign issue at a time when candidates might be expected to focus more on unemployment or the spiraling European economic crisis.

The tabloid-ready story, first raised in a public television documentary in mid-February, has given far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen the chance to point out yet another capitulation to Islam under President Nicolas Sarkozy's watch. With characteristic embellishment, Le Pen claimed on Feb. 18 that all meat eaten in the Paris region is now slaughtered according to Islamic ritual.

Sarkozy visited a meat locker to deny her claims, saying less than 3 percent of meat consumed in France is halal (or kosher), and the government announced a new system for tracing slaughtered animals. But the scandal, pardon the pun, had legs: Non-Muslim French people have unwittingly eaten thousands of tons of halal meat. Sensing a political opening, the National Front leader filed consumer fraud and animal cruelty lawsuits on Feb. 23 to keep the issue alive.

Faced with the reality of public opinion that is receptive to the halal issue, Sarkozy and his lieutenants decided that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. The interior minister warned that granting municipal voting rights to foreigners could lead to halal meat being imposed on school cafeterias. The president threw his support behind the National Front's proposal to label all halal meat and told reporters that halal meat is the "number one issue" on the French electorate's mind.

Read the full article »

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: Foreign Policy

State-Mosque Relations in Europe, the Other Half of the Story

Jonathan Laurence — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's Note: In his new book, The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims: The State's Role in Minority Integration, Jonathan Laurence further develops his commentary on minority integration in Europe, assessing how these nations have responded to the growing presence of Muslim immigrants over the past fifty years.

Just over 1 percent of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims reside in Western Europe, yet this minority has had a disproportionate impact on religion and politics in its new home.

In just 50 years, the Muslim population has ballooned from some tens of thousands to 16 or 17 million in 2010 -- approximately one out of every 25 Western Europeans.

On the one hand, there is a growing belief among native European populations that Islam, once allowed to flourish unchecked in post-war Europe, must be halted. This worldview exhorts Europeans to awaken from their slumber and defeat “Eurabia.” Against this narrative is the view, held by some Muslim community leaders, that European governments are uniformly repressive and intolerant of diversity. Both narratives are inadequate and, more importantly, each misses the broader trend of what is actually happening on the ground.

Europeans and Muslims have been successfully negotiating with and adapting to one another over the past 10 years. This is affirmed by several crucial nation-building moments. In what are mundane but arguably critical domains for religious integration -- such as mosque construction, the training of imams and chaplains, the availability of halal food and visas for the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca -- Muslim communities and European governments have begun to talk and act in concert.

Contrast this with 10 or 15 years ago, when Islam remained basically unknown as a domestic policy issue to European politicians and administrators. To the extent religious questions were addressed, it was the domain of immigration authorities and diplomats --not parliaments and interior ministries. Islamic community organizations in European cities also reflected this state of affairs; far from being organically rooted in local European culture and politics, they were still dominated by foreign governments and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

A new landscape is taking shape in which Muslim leaders are increasingly finding a place in the society and institutions of their adoptive countries. A new political consensus -- and administrative praxis -- is taking hold, reflecting the spreading pragmatic recognition of Muslims’ irreversible presence in Europe.

The decade from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s was a period of major growth in state-Islam relations in Europe. The most striking illustration of a Europe-wide move toward the integration of Islam came with the development of national consultations with prayer spaces and civil society organizations. Gone were governments’ ad-hoc responses to questions facing Muslim communities and the inter-ministerial working groups of previous decades, and in came corporatist-style institution building and the establishment of institutions to negotiate “state-mosque” relations.

Across Europe, the summit of institutional recognition and domestication took the form of Islamic boards. Boards such as the French Council of the Muslim Faith, the Spanish Islamic Council, the German Islam Conference and the Italian Islam Committee helped resolve practical issues of religious infrastructure –- from creating places for imams and chaplains in public institutions to the regulation of mosques, religious education, halal food and visas for the hajj.

As this new reality continues, a new order of community leadership and imams is emerging, one that mixes more with local society -- including Muslims of all backgrounds as well as non-Muslims -- and is better acquainted with pluralist systems of state-religion relations, European cultural norms as well as languages. As Muslim organizations navigate the institutions that govern religious exercise, authorities can enjoy consultative opportunities as well as provide an incentive structure to encourage interreligious dialogue and security cooperation with local officials.

Organizations and leadership which previously looked only beyond European borders for Islamic authority and authenticity are slowly gaining domestic institutional references as well.

There is still plenty of room for improvement within the new spaces of mediation. But that will only take place if the gains of the past decade are not conceded to the exaggerated pessimism of negative narratives about the future of Muslims in Europe. If progress is to continue, both “sides” need to look up and mentally register that the sky is not falling.

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: Today's Zaman

Integrating Europe’s Muslims

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:00:00 -0500

Event Information

February 17, 2012
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM EST

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

Over the next 20 years, Europe’s Muslim population is projected to grow from 17 million to nearly 30 million, which would represent 7 to 8 percent of all Europeans. In his new book, The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims (Princeton, 2012), Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Jonathan Laurence argues that rising integration problems and fears about terrorism have led governments to assertively step up efforts to engage their Muslim communities and incorporate them into the institutional, political and cultural fabrics of European democracy. However, these governments still have critical steps to take before integration can be judged a success.

On February 17, the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings (CUSE) hosted a discussion to explore the integration of Muslims in Europe and how it is linked to the ongoing struggle for religious and political authority in the Muslim-majority world. Finnish Minister for Foreign Affairs Erkki Tuomioja and Professor Peter Mandaville of George Mason University joined Jonathan Laurence in the discussion. Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Omer Taspinar provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

After the program, panelists took audience questions.

Participants

Panelists

Peter Mandaville

Associate Professor of Political Science
Founding Director, Center for Global Studies, George Mason University

Erkki Tuomioja

Minister for Foreign Affairs
Republic of Finland

How to Integrate Europe’s Muslims

Jonathan Laurence — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Two weeks ago, dozens of cars were set alight in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand after a 30-year-old truck driver, Wissam El-Yamni, was roughed up and then died while in police custody. The uproar underscored the hostility of young minority men toward authority across communities in Europe, an antipathy that has at times led to deadly violence.

The failure of Islamic integration in Europe is often attributed — especially by right-wing parties — to an excess of tolerance toward the large-scale Muslim immigration that began in the mid-1970s. By recognizing Muslim religious requirements, the argument goes, countries like France, Britain and the Netherlands have unwittingly hindered assimilation and even, in some cases, fostered radicalism. But the unrest in gritty European suburbs stems not from religious difference, but from anomie.

Europeans should not be afraid to allow Muslim students to take classes on Islam in state-financed schools and universities. The recognition and accommodation of Islamic religious practices, from clothing to language to education, does not mean capitulation to fundamentalism. On the contrary, only by strengthening the democratic rights of Muslim citizens to form associations, join political parties and engage in other aspects of civic life can Europe integrate immigrants and give full meaning to the abstract promise of religious liberty.

The rise of right-wing, anti-immigrant parties has led several European countries to impose restrictions on Islamic dress, mosque-building and reunification of families through immigration law. These policies are counterproductive. Paradoxically, people for whom religion is otherwise not all that important become more attached to their faith’s clothing, symbols and traditions when they feel they are being singled out and denied basic rights.

Take, for example, the French debate over whether to recognize the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha as official holidays. Yes, the French state clings to the principle of “laïcité,” or secularism — but the state’s recognition of Easter and Christmas as official holidays feels, to some Jews and Muslims, like hypocrisy. It is Islam’s absence in the institutions young European Muslims encounter, starting with the school’s calendar, classroom and canteen, that contributes to anger and alienation.

In the last few months, there have been some signs that the right-wing momentum has slowed. A French bill to ban headscarves from day care centers was killed in committee. The Dutch Parliament voted down a bill to outlaw Islamic animal slaughter. And Germany’s most populous state helped offset a judicial ban on school prayer by announcing equal access to religion courses for Muslim students.

European countries could use a period of benign neglect of the Islam issue — but only after they finish incorporating religion into the national fabric. For too long, they have instead masked an absence of coherent integration policy under the cloak of “multiculturalism.” The state outsourced the hard work of integration to foreign diplomats and Islamist institutions — for example, some students in Germany read Saudi-supplied textbooks in Saudi-run institutions.

This neglect of integration helped an unregulated “underground Islam” to take hold in storefronts, basements and courtyards. It reflected wishful thinking about how long guest workers would stay and perpetuated a myth of eventual departure and repatriation.

In Britain, for example, race-based equality laws protected Sikhs and Jews as minorities, but not Hindus and Muslims, since they were still considered “foreign.”

Institutional exclusion fueled a demand for religious recognition, and did much to unite and segregate Muslims. Islamist organizations became the most visible defenders of the faith. It is crucial now to provide the right mix of institutional incentives for religious and political moderation, and the most promising strategy for doing that is for governments to consult with the full range of law-abiding religious institutions that Muslims have themselves established.

The French Council for the Muslim Faith, the German Islam Conference, the Committee for Italian Islam and the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board in Britain — all state-sanctioned Islamic organizations set up in the past decade — represent a broad cross-section of mosque administrators in every country. They have quietly begun reconciling many practical issues, from issuing mosque permits to establishing Islamic theology departments at public universities to appointing chaplains in the military and in prisons.

Ultimately, however, elected democratic institutions are the place where the desires of individual Muslims should be expressed. Ever since 1789, when a French legislator argued that “the Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals,” Europeans have struggled to resolve the tension between rights derived from universal citizenship versus group membership.

Over the next 20 years, Europe’s Muslim population is projected to grow to nearly 30 million — 7 to 8 percent of all Europeans — from around 17 million. Granting Muslims full religious freedom wouldn’t remove obstacles to political participation or create jobs. But it would at least allow tensions over Muslims’ religious practices to fade. This would avoid needless sectarian strife and clear the way for politicians to address the more vexing and urgent challenges of socioeconomic integration.

Authors

Jonathan Laurence

Publication: The New York Times

Will Europe Shrink from the Arab Spring?

Jonathan Laurence and Ömer Taşpınar — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 12:26:00 -0500

Will the Arab Spring finally end the European Union’s lethargic approach to the southern Mediterranean and lead to more serious support for democratization? Don’t hold your breath. There are three key reasons why “business as usual” with only cosmetic changes is likely to remain the norm.

First and foremost is the fact that Europe is in deep economic and financial crisis. With growing discord between France, Britain and Germany, not only the future of the euro but the very foundations of the European Union are at stake. Consumed by its own existential crisis, a serious rethinking of foreign policy is obviously not a top priority for the EU at the moment.

The second reason why we should not expect Europe to seriously change its policy toward the southern Mediterranean is the success of Islamist parties in post-Arab Spring elections. For decades, Europe’s primary concern in the southern Mediterranean has been security and economic development. Anti-terrorism cooperation, border controls against immigration and economic assistance to corrupt but friendly authoritarian regimes were the hallmarks of a series of EU projects, ranging from the Barcelona Process (which became the Union for the Mediterranean in 2008) to the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) and European Neighborhood Policy (ENP). This “security and development first” mindset came at the expense of genuine support for democratization in countries like Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.

The logic behind such European programs -- and similar American policies -- can be best summarized as the fear of the alternative. Autocrats like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak became masters at exploiting such Western fears by presenting radical Islam as the only alternative to their repressive regimes. Now that Islamist parties are coming out ahead in parliamentary elections in Egypt and Tunisia, some serious second thoughts about democracy in the Arab world are likely to emerge.

Finally, the third reason to believe that Europe is unlikely to change its foreign policy toward the southern Mediterranean is Europe’s continuing reluctance to embrace Turkey, whose own success as a prospering secular democracy owes so much to its European vocation. To be sure, the EU cannot offer membership prospects to its southern neighbors in North Africa. But it could rethink its approach to and support for democratization there. Yet, the fact that the EU sidelines even a country like Turkey shows the limits of Europe’s current geostrategic vision toward the Muslim world.

Read the full article on the World Politics Review website »

Authors

Publication: World Politics Review

Brookings: Experts - Jonathan Laurence

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Marseille's Charmed Life May Not Last: Reaction to Shootings in Toulouse, France

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Don't Be Fooled: Integration in Germany is Making Progress

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State-Mosque Relations in Europe, the Other Half of the Story

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Integrating Europe’s Muslims

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How to Integrate Europe’s Muslims

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Will Europe Shrink from the Arab Spring?

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