A View from the Past

This article aims to spur clear-eyed, open debate on the topic of what role religious minorities play in European Union (EU) policy-making on immigration, and so contribute to the formulation of a long-term, sustainable reflection on migration in the EU. Let us put into context first the difficult accommodation of millions of human beings in Europe after the Second World War and the slow process at EU level of providing a legal basis for ‘promoting integration’ before tackling – as a second step – the different ways in which religion and immigration interact in European politics.

Integrating migrants, refugees and their descendants was and is of critical importance for the future of the EU. But past integration efforts have increasingly come into question. The shock of multiple terrorist attacks, uncertainty about growing cultural and religious diversity, as well as concerns about future economic prospects – particularly for the young – provide fertile ground for toxic narratives of fear and hate. Left uncontested, such narratives can fuel populist, xenophobic discourses that turn immigrants into convenient scapegoats, and that ultimately threaten to destabilize the entire ‘European project’. Migratory flows, be they flows of asylum-seekers, labour migrants or irregular migrants, have been associated with various problems, including terrorism, criminality and social unrest. As a consequence, migration and asylum issues have become important topics of contemporary security politics in Europe, both in the ‘real world’ of policies and in the scholarly literature on the subject. Massive refugee flows to Europe are now forcing the EU to rethink its asylum and immigration management policies.

According to the United Nations 2017 International Migration Report, the European Union (EU) hosts 77.9 million migrants against 57.7 million for the United States (US) (United Nations 2017), meaning that the phenomenon is commensurable on both sides of the Atlantic. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with its commitment to leave no one behind, recognizes that international migration is of major relevance for the development of the countries of origin, transit and destination, requiring coherent and comprehensive responses. In the Agenda, Governments pledged to ‘facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies’.

According to the UN Refugee Agency’s annual Global Trends study (June 2018) the number of displaced persons and refugees across the world had reached a record 68.5 million people at the end of 2017 (United Nations 2018). Wars, violence and persecution uprooted record numbers of men, women and children worldwide in 2017, making a new global deal on refugees more critical than ever. Refugees who have fled their countries to escape conflict and persecution accounted for 25.4 million. This is 2.9 million more than in 2016, and also the biggest increase the UN High Commission for Refugees has ever seen in a single year. Refugees denote both the group of people fleeing conflict to a nearby country and those whose asylum applications in Europe have been approved. The number of asylum-seekers awaiting the outcome of their applications for refugee status had risen by about 300,000, to 3.1 million, by the end of December 2017. People displaced inside their own country accounted for 40 million of the total. And, overwhelmingly, it is developing countries that are most affected. We must go back to the Second World War to find similar figures. Of these people, the vast majority are displaced within their own country, or refugees in a neighbouring country. The developing world in Asia and the poorest in Africa are the main regions of both exit and reception of refugees, and only a small minority reaches the more developed countries or the EU in particular.

It is worth recalling that the EU faced strong sudden population movements in the past, especially in the post-Second World War period, with massive and not always voluntary transfers between Central and Eastern European countries – especially towards Germany and Poland – and after the decolonizations of the 1960s (repatriations to France of almost one million people and to Portugal of some 600,000). Since the 1970s, there has been a division in Europe between countries that have opened their doors to asylum seekers and countries that have not. Germany has obviously always led the group of welcoming countries in absolute terms, although relative to population other countries, such as Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Switzerland, exceeded it (in the period 1994–2002). In fact, asylum, together with family reunification, became the only legal channel of entry for migrants once, in the mid-1970s, after the oil crisis, the channels for labour migration had been closed.

Following the crisis of the communist system in Eastern Europe and the USSR, Germany received 2.5 million people of German origin from all those territories, in addition to 900,000 asylum seekers fleeing the Yugoslav wars or from Turkey. In fact, 70% of these refugees were welcomed in Germany, although the country was itself going through difficult times owing of the cost of reunification and the integration of the Aussiedler (Germans from Eastern Europe).

With the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s, the EU for the first time tried to jointly manage a massive influx of refugees, but at the time it did not have the legal or political instruments that would allow coordinated action. The arrival of the Yugoslav refugees in the 1990s meant a change of scale and marked the beginning of complaints and protests by the most welcoming States about an unfair distribution of asylum seekers. Trying to give a balanced response, the European Commission created a Common European Asylum System (CEAS) with the aim of unifying procedures, establishing a common minimum in terms of attention to asylees, and avoiding asylum shopping. Under the well-known Dublin regulation (1997, amended in 2003), the asylum seeker entering the EU through Croatia, for example, must be registered in that country, where her or his fingerprints will be taken, and he/she must apply for asylum there. If your application is denied in that State the applicant cannot resubmit in another EU State.

A new refugee crisis, with asylum seekers coming from across the Mediterranean, affected the EU from 2011 on, when the so-called ‘Arab springs’ ended the controls that Tunisia and Libya exercised on the outflow of irregular migration from their territories to Italy and Malta. Simultaneously, the political crisis in Syria led to a war that caused more than 5.5 million refugees. A record 1.3 million migrants applied for asylum in the 28 member states of the European Union, Norway and Switzerland in 2015 – nearly double the previous high water mark of roughly 700,000 that was set in 1992 after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet Union, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical agency (Connor Reference Connor2017). This crisis forced the EU to rethink its asylum system and the management of irregular immigration and to do it quickly to stop a flow that does not seem to stop and whose immediate consequences threaten some of the main achievements of the EU, the space without borders of Schengen, and the future itself of the EU (European Commission 2018). How important is integrating migrants, refugees and their descendants for the future of the European Union?

European societies are, and will continue becoming, ‘increasingly diverse […] Ensuring that all those who are rightfully and legitimately in the EU, regardless of the length of their stay, can participate and contribute is key to the future well-being, prosperity and cohesion of European societies’. In times when discrimination, prejudice, racism and xenophobia are on the rise, there are legal, moral and economic imperatives to upholding the EU’s fundamental rights, values and freedoms and continuing to work for a more cohesive society overall. The successful integration of third-country nationals is thus a matter of common interest to all Member States (European Commission 2016).

When did the European Union start to promote the integration of third-country nationals? This was not before the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty (2009) when a legal basis was provided for promoting integration at EU level:

Previously, in 2004, the Justice and Home Affairs Council had adopted 11 Common Basic Principles (CBPs) for Immigrant Integration Policy in the EU (Council of the European Union 2004). These are a set of commonly agreed policy principles guiding integration efforts that are ‘complementary and in full synergy with existing legislative frameworks, including the international instruments on Human Rights’. This guiding principle sets the EU’s human rights-compliant paradigm: not merely expecting compliance with rules and values, but also offering migrants real opportunities to participate in a meaningful way in the society they have chosen to live in, treating them equally and making them feel part of society rather than tolerated guests (see Annex).

If immigration is a permanent feature of European society, it is vital for Member States to maintain and further develop societies in which newcomers feel welcome, defined by a spirit of mutual understanding and accommodation, and where there are clear expectations of all residents – new and old – to develop stronger economies, greater social cohesion, increased security and cultural diversity.

Integration Policies and Religious Minorities at the European Level

When monitoring the outcome of integration policies, four areas have priority: employment, education, social inclusion, and active citizenship. Integration policies aim to ensure equal rights, obligations and opportunities for all. Not only access to the labour market is important but also entry into society more generally, which makes social inclusion an important area. On the other hand, the participation of immigrants in the democratic process as active citizens supports their integration and enhances their sense of belonging.

Interesting from our point of view is the denominational belonging of immigrants to Europe: 26 million are Christians (57% of the foreign-born population) against 13 million Muslims (26%). Even when intra-European migration is excluded, Europe has slightly more Christian than Muslims migrants (13 million against 12 million) (Pew Research Forum 2012).

From a demographic standpoint, according to the Pew Research Center projections in April 2015: ‘Europe is expected to have fewer Christians and more Muslims and other religious minorities. But while these changes will be significant, they will not radically alter the continent’s religious composition’ (Masci Reference Masci2015). The findings are, then, that the percentage of Christians is expected to decline in Europe in part because Christians on the continent are older than other groups, with a median age of 42 in 2010. By contrast, Muslims have a median age of 32. Religious switching is another projection for Christians, i.e. leaving Christianity and joining the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated. The share of people who do not identify with a religious group is expected to grow from 19% of Europe’s population in 2010 to 23% by 2050. The percentage of Muslims on the other hand is expected to grow in Europe because they have a younger population and a higher fertility rate (2.1 children per woman) than any other major religious group. Furthermore, ongoing immigration from the Middle East, Africa and Asia is expected to stoke growth but the increase is modest as a share of Europe’s population, from 6% in 2010 to 10% in 2050. The populations of other, smaller religious minorities will also increase, although in each case from a much smaller base than that of Europe’s Muslims. For instance, Buddhists and Hindus are expected to double as a share of Europe’s population – in both cases rising from 0.2% to 0.4%. More specifically, then, in the current debates about Muslim migrants in Europe we should focus on three contending factors: (a) Europe is still predominantly Christian; (b) Europe is a multi-faith country; and (c) Europe is mainly a secular country (Foret Reference Foret2014).

We need to tackle religion as a multidimensional factor, because for Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs religion is not just about belief but sometimes primarily about community and cultural heritage or identity, including resisting stereotypes about one’s own community or discriminatory treatment. Yet another way in which religion is not just about belief is that it often requires a public performance or specific forms of behaviour, e.g. in relation to codes of dress or food, and so is much more publicly visible and sometimes requires institutional adaptation in order to be accommodated (Modood Reference Modood2017). Institutions and areas of public life that no longer need to take into account Christian conventions are now having to adjust to the needs of minority faiths. In consequence, minority religions have come to have a significant – even if contested – public presence (Modood Reference Modood, Dinham, Furbey and Lowndes2009, 1–20). Public campaigns for inclusion and equality, conflicts over faith schools, women’s dress and gender more generally, not to mention all the issues to do with the ‘war on terrorism’ and Islamist radicalism, have made religion much more politically prominent and visible in public affairs (McCrea Reference McCrea2010).

Public dialogue, representation and leadership is often sought and realized by those who define themselves in terms of religious community organizations. In this sense, churches and faith communities see themselves as responsible for participating in civil society and having various tasks, as the representative of the Churches Commission for Migrants in Europe underlines:

When it comes to policymaking in the immigration field, religious organizations are accepted in the process if they are seen as experts in a secular sense. Their religious identity is partially ‘neutralized’ by their competences as providers of services, which legitimizes their participation in policymaking. Religious actors are forced to adapt to the institutional and political environment of the European Union by adopting a secular language, portraying themselves as experts in technical terms, building alliances with other secular and religious actors, and using common routes to seek influence such as lobbying and consultative forums. Although its linkage with immigration is considered one of the key factors to understand the renewed salience of religion in European public spheres, we can conclude that religion is not a commanding force but a secondary factor to play into political and social conflicts. For many it is an ethical voice and gives credentials to actors from majority denominations in the European Union but it is an elusive issue within immigration policymaking.

Annex