Social and political relations between Europe and the Muslim world are politically fractious.Footnote ¹ Attacks in Madrid (March 2004) and London (July 2005), and the riots in suburban Paris in November 2005 and November 2007, have all been attributed to “Muslims”.Footnote ² Political parties in Europe (for example the Front National in France, which placed second in the presidential elections of 2002), have mobilized opinion against a Muslim threat to Europe. Relations between the countries and societies of the European Union and the Muslim World have therefore become politically consequential on a number of dimensions – foreign policy in regard to the Middle East; new membership into the EU; and the vast migration of Muslim populations into EU states.

Europe has a cosmopolitan self-image, one of tolerance toward difference. In support of this, recent studies have found that there are no particular problems faced by Muslims in Europe. The Pew poll of 2006 found that “while there are some signs of tension between Europe’s majority populations and its Muslim minorities, Muslims there do not generally believe that most Europeans are hostile toward people of their faith”. Furthermore, “Substantial majorities of Muslims living in the European countries surveyed say that in [the two years after the bombings in Spain and London, and the Cartoon CrisisFootnote ³ in Denmark] they have not had any personally bad experience attributable to their race, ethnicity or religion”.Footnote ⁴

Yet Europe – with states being defined by their historic nationalities, all which are in the Christian tradition – is seen as having a particular problem with Islam going back to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans and the Reconquest of Spain in the 15^th century. Thus there is throughout the continent a myth of a “Christian Europe” that is maintained despite its virtually complete secularization in the past century. This is clearly manifested in Turkey’s application to join EU (as opposed to Bulgaria’s, which was a relatively easy success), where suspicions run high.Footnote ⁵ And in the Pew survey, which in general presented very positive feelings by Muslim migrants in Europe, the report notes that “over a third of Muslims in France [...] say they have had a bad experience as a result of their religion or ethnicity”, and 39 percent of the Muslim respondents in France agree that “most or many Europeans are hostile to Muslims”.Footnote ⁶ French policies to incorporate Muslims into a docile and accommodative corporatist group have often backfired, with state authorities accused of imposing leaders on them who are more acceptable to the King of Morocco than to French Muslims.Footnote ⁷ Moreover, in France, 76 percent of the non-Muslim respondents expressed concern over Muslim extremism in their country. Even in the highly tolerant Netherlands, the Muslim issue has wreaked political havoc, with a near populist revolt against Islamic immigration. In a short period, the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered for blasphemy by a homegrown Muslim fundamentalist, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a (Muslim) Somali woman who became a Member of Parliament and was the subject of death threats for her criticism of radical Islam, was temporarily stripped of her Dutch citizenship (albeit for incorrect claims on her asylum application form) and subsequently left the country in bitterness.Footnote ⁸

There is then a popular impression of an impenetrable wall between Christian Europe and the Muslim world. This ideology has helped breed resentment among immigrant populations in the EU, with significant implications for their future loyalty to the states that are hosting them. For example, a survey in London has shown that, in other immigrant groups, descendents of immigrants become more secular; among Muslims, however, the reverse tendency applies.Footnote ⁹ This is a popular impression. Consider a lead sentence by a respected columnist for The New York Times in the wake of riots in central Paris in response to the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in France. “Even at the best of times”, James Markam’s article reads, “the relations between native Western Europeans and the roughly six million Muslims who live in their midst are difficult. At the bottom of the economic order, Muslim immigrants frequently suffer from prejudice and discrimination, and many cling to their faith as a talisman of a separate identity”.Footnote ¹⁰

Thus conventional wisdom points both to a cosmopolitan Europe open to Muslim immigrants and a closed Europe suspicious of these same immigrants.

This is the backdrop for Christopher Caldwell’s passionate defense of a rational Islamophobia. After several years of reporting for The Financial Times and other newspapers on this hot issue, he has consolidated and expanded his perspective in a single volume. His well-received bookFootnote ¹¹ describes the short-sighted policies deployed throughout Western Europe to encourage migration, the naïve beliefs of those in the political classes that these migrants and their children would become secular modernists, and the growing demographic presence of Muslim citizens in Europe who are threatening the Enlightenment traditions of a Christian (in spirit and heritage) continent. Eurocrats, in utter defiance of Europe’s median voter, seek to accommodate Turkey into the EU, a move Caldwell sees as a final solution to Europe’s Christian heritage.Footnote ¹² Ordinary Europeans, in defiance of their self-deceiving leaders, are, according to Caldwell’s reckoning, rightfully and rationally Islamophobes.

One could – and I shall – pick at a litany of nits. But nit-picking need not destroy an entire argument. The bulk of the disturbing facts reported in this volume are valid. The real challenge for the social scientist responding to this perspective is to examine whether a less ominous vision could make better sense of the accumulated facts. By taking Caldwell’s Islamophobia seriously, we can reach a clearer view of the so-called Islamic threat to the integrity of European culture and political institutions.

Summary of principal points

The primary point of the thesis propounded by Caldwell is that it was an historic (and short-sighted) error for European politicians and business leaders to invite into their countries a Muslim workforce (p. 35). These invitations were made willy-nilly, with no consideration for the long term consequences of the settling-in of these immigrant populations on the integrity of the national cultures of Europe. In addition, he argues, the economic returns on this investment in a foreign workforce were paltry.

Second, he is insistent that, while Europeans are resolutely secular, they share a Christian heritage that contains an implicit common knowledge component. Caldwell points out that “In European secularism, there is always a tacit balance between Christianity and Enlightenment skepticism” but one in which “certain ethical survivals [...] democracy, individualism, freedom of conscience, and speech [...] of Christianity [...] w[ere] assumed” (pp. 194-197). It is this common Christian heritage, Caldwell asserts, that is now at risk from a religious community that sees secularism not as part of a balance with religion, but rather as a threat to its core values.

Third, he points out, while this workforce is comfortable in Europe, it uses European freedoms to undermine the cultures and societies of its hosts. He reports on evidence of continued separate loyalties, such as the fact that UK Muslims joined the military at roughly one-twentieth the rate of other Britons (p. 157). Or that only 5 percent of Turks could see themselves being buried in Germany (p. 157). Or that French and British citizens from Muslim backgrounds were found supporting the anti-US insurgency in Iraq (p. 163). Or that sharia, a legal system that would pose a threat to female autonomy, has great support among Muslim populations throughout Europe (p. 222). Or that assimilation through marriage is rare in Europe, and that Muslims prefer to seek spouses from their home countries in order to sustain antediluvian gender roles (p. 226). Or that there have been numerous incidents of students of Arab origin in France hurling ethnic slurs at their teachers (p. 233). Or that Muslims genitally mutilate their women and physically attack artists who are religious iconoclasts. To address the threats that these reported facts pose, Cardwell argues, European governments are progressively withdrawing the hard won rights to privacy that liberal Europe once treasured.

Fourth, in the face of the Islamic threat, the cornerstone of European policy in its policy toward Muslims is to interpret Muslim behavior with a “childish credulity” (p. 100) and to “reach out to so-called ‘moderate Muslims’” (p. 283). European compromises in extending official status to Islamic holidays or in demanding the removal of crosses as a balance to legislation against the foulard are for Caldwell “disingenuous on an intellectual level” and display a “phony neutrality” (p. 198). He derides U.S. President George W. Bush’s statement in the wake of the 9/11 attacks that “Islam is Peace” as inadequately acknowledging that Islam poses a genuine threat to Christian values (p. 193). European educators teach ecclesiastical critics such as Voltaire to their students but they essentially cower in the face of Muslim leadership’s threats to those dissenting against Muslim practices. These accommodations to the threats of Muslim leaders undermine the freedom of speech so precious to European traditions (pp. 201-205). Moreover “phony neutrality” has led to everyday hypocrisy in lawmaking. Danish marriage laws that rendered marriage to foreigners a difficult bureaucratic procedure were justified not as a way of preventing Muslim immigrants from importing young wives from the home country and thereby increasing the Muslim population; rather they were justified as solving the general problem of too many quick marriages. The French headscarf law was not justified as a way to challenge the cultural power of Islamic imams; rather it was justified as a rule that all religious displays in schools were counter to the superior French principle of laïcité.

Fifth, Cardwell argues, Europe’s “politically correct” cornerstone is fundamentally flawed, because Islam is “in no sense Europe’s religion and it is in no sense Europe’s culture” (p.349) and in the battle for allegiance of the offspring of migrants, and especially for those who have good jobs (p. 169), “For now Islam is the stronger party” (p. 349). Caldwell confidently reports that even those second generation Muslims who are doing well are “dis-assimilating” (p. 133). Europeans are “not dealing with an ordinary immigration problem… but with an adversary culture” (p. 171). This is a threat to all that Europeans hold dear.

Sixth, Caldwell claims, the European public smells the rat, especially concerning the European Commission that is vigilant in support of the rights of immigrants but lax in assessing their danger. Eurocrats are insistent that Turkey obtains a good deal in negotiations for EU accession. In the wake of this technocratic blindness, anti-immigration and Islamophobe parties are forming throughout Europe and winning large shares of votes. The Potemkin village of liberal multiculturalism, as well as the European community vision, is likely to collapse in the wake of a rather ugly political assault both from the far right (p. 80) and from the socially liberal left, as for example in the spectacular rise of Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands. He combined a radical left libertarian doctrine with an expressed fear that the culturally conservative Muslims would undermine all the social gains won by women and homosexuals (pp. 307-312).

These six points are made with passion, a feel for the field, and a sense of no holds barred realism. They demand a considered response. But first, a few nits.

Picking Nits

There is a rhetorical contradiction that pervades the thesis of rational Islamophobia. Caldwell insists that any adjustments such as increased surveillance of radicals to the threat posed by Islam would undermine “the essence of Europe” (p. 13), for example by having its freedoms lost as systems of surveillance invade all European households. But this “essence” is impossible to illustrate. Is it Christianity? Caldwell points to European secularization, defining religion for Europeans as “an irrational opinion, strongly held” (p. 181), and indeed this skepticism is seen as one part of the “essence of European-ness” (p. 182). Caldwell goes to some lengths to carve out a European religious viewpoint, one that encourages rationalism, secularism, and dissent. But he admits, regarding the major question of religion’s role in society, that “Europeans have given no clear answer” (p. 197). So there is no essential European culture; what he observes is a congeries of changing beliefs and practices among European populations. Moreover, Caldwell points to what he sees as a “breakdown” in the European family (p. 239) without acknowledging that this fact also undermines any notion of an essential European culture that Muslims are threatening. Caldwell mentions Europe’s racist past (p. 27) but this seems not to be part of Europe’s essence. Caldwell agrees with Muslim critics that European culture is marred by “atomization […] consumerism […] sexual wantonness” (p. 134) but these are not part of Europe’s essence either. Cardwell never refers to the hierarchical and male-dominated Vatican (with values, as we shall see, closer to Europe’s Muslims than to Europe’s Catholics) as representing Europe’s essence, but one wonders why not. Caldwell, in his concluding statements, points out that “there is no consensus […] about what European values are” (p. 345). If there is no united European vision, how can Caldwell assert that its essence is under siege?

Caldwell relies on unreflective pop-psychology to underline his points, but those very points are often undermined by self-contradiction. For example, he derides attempts to win the hearts and minds of Muslims through the reduction of discrimination, as advocated by a British report to the Prime Minister, accusing them of “condescending” to those Muslims by thinking that they might be won over by the acts of non-Muslims. “If Muslims are like other people they will tend to build their ideologies out of their own values and aspirations, rather than other people’s” (p. 274). To deride efforts to reduce discrimination, citing a rather vague and undemonstrated psychological universal, is rather unconvincing. But worse, only several pages later (p. 300) Caldwell asserts that hostile Muslim migration to Europe was the source of its self-conception of being European. And then he writes (p. 301) that the conditions for unifying Europe are as bright as ever, in part due to its re-acquaintance with (and common fear of) Islam. Furthermore, Caldwell conjectures that the intense religiosity among Muslims in Europe “spurs religiosity among non-Muslims” (p. 184). One can infer that for Caldwell, Muslims act only out of their own values and aspirations, but Europeans act in response to those of others.

Yet another contradiction: early on in the book, Caldwell insists that the notion of a “diversity of Islams” in Europe is a fiction created by European leaders to minimize the threat of a Muslim assault on European values and culture (pp. 22-23). But later on, in seeking to understand the varied Muslim responses to 9/11, Caldwell reports that “in virtually all polls, British Muslims stand out as significantly more radical than all other European Muslim populations” (p. 257). His refusal to admit that there is diversity among Muslims prevents him from analyzing the question as to what policies or environments work best to integrate them into Europe.

Quotations with which Caldwell agrees receive no critical scrutiny. He cites the German jurist Udo di Fabio that “The adherents of our well-intentioned politics of tolerance [...] are missing the basic problem. Why in God’s name should a member of a vital world culture want to integrate into Western culture?” (pp. 347-348). There are plenty of good reasons: education, security, jobs, and freedom. A good riposte might have been: well a great majority have so integrated that the question then becomes what do we do about the small minority that refuses and is dangerous? But since di Fabio’s rhetorical question is in accord with Caldwell’s answer, this jurist gets a free ride. Caldwell even takes statements by Oriana Fallaci such as, “Any theologian can tell you that the Koran authorizes lies, calumny and hypocrisy in defense of the faith” – and interprets them as containing an important kernel of truth, validated by leading (and friendly) authorities of Islam (pp. 94-95).

Some of Caldwell’s inferences stand without any support. He sees “not much ambiguity about what [Mosque building in Europe] meant”, and this had nothing to do (as apologists conjectured) with making a “provisional foothold” to soften the integration process. “No”, Caldwell insists, “it was a declaration that people intended [...] to live henceforth as they had in the old country from time immemorial” (pp. 134-135). Leave aside the problem that Islam does not precede time immemorial even in its home countries. One can still wonder how Caldwell can assert this with hardly any evidence on the motivations that go into Mosque building. (At least part of this is related to generous donations from abroad that, if spent as donors wish, would presage future good will.)

Caldwell often conflates immigrant effects with Muslim-effects. For example, he writes (p. 143) about Angelo Hoekelet, a young Congolese man who was stopped by the police for traveling without a ticket. In the confrontation, he attacked the gendarmes and quickly called for help. A crowd at the Gare du Nord took his side and supposedly shouted “Nique la France” (Fuck France). This is an ugly scene, but it doesn’t illustrate any Muslim effect. If all immigrants have this view of France, why the focus on the clash of European and Muslim civilizations?

Caldwell has many facts to relate, but they are not always used in direct support of his thesis. As a lead sentence in one paragraph (p. 175) he writes that “the importance and prestige of Islam are on the rise” in most Muslim communities in Europe. Yet the paragraph merely shows that European Muslims are more religious than Christians, which is quite a different point. Facts are used indiscriminately to support vague generalizations throughout. So much for the nits.

Where is Social Science?

Caldwell writes on a crucial social concern that has remained largely immune from serious social scientific investigation. This is due to several factors. First, there is the general difficulty of isolating the Muslim component from the general issue of a new wave of culturally different immigrants into relatively homogeneous political communities. Every new wave of immigrants – whether they be Jews, Chinese or Irish in 19^th century America, Hispanics in 20^th century America, Koreans in Japan, Caribbeans in the UK in the 1960s – induces a popular literature on how this particular group is less assimilable than others, threatening the established cultures of the societies they are “invading”. Given the different circumstances in which the waves have appeared, from different social classes as well as different cultures, there is no easy way to calculate which groups are more or less assimilable.

Second, the difficulty of isolating a Muslim problem is also due to the fact that the manufacturing depression that hit Europe in the 1990s especially hit the immigrants who were induced to enter the industrial suburbs of Europe in the 1960s and 70s, and they were mostly from the Muslim world. Those second generation Muslim children are living in housing estates without job opportunities or the resources to move to where jobs are available. The seething discontent in these suburbs may not be a Muslim issue; but it is mostly Muslims who now live in these depressed bidonvilles, making it appear that the discontent is related to the religion of its residents.

Third, social scientific investigations have not really solved the methodological problem of statistical confounds. The great majority of Muslims in France are from North Africa; the great majority of Muslims in the UK are from South Asia; the great majority of Muslims in Germany are from Turkey. Survey research on political views and economic circumstances cannot easily distinguish country effects from religious effects. This is not solved by cross national survey research, in part because that research (such as the World Values Survey) does not have enough Muslim respondents to permit inferential leverage. But the more significant issue is that once you put country of origin fixed effects in statistical models of social or political integration, variables that identify the religion of respondent lose significance.Footnote ¹³

Despite these hurdles, there are several studies that merit attention here. Some of them add support to Caldwell’s Islamophobia. But some recent findings compel us to lose confidence in several of Caldwell’s claims.

A paper by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, relying on data from the World Values Survey, reveals that Muslim respondents living in Muslim countries value democracy in a statistically significant (but substantively small) way more than largely Christian respondents living in Western societies. Meanwhile, Muslim respondents have a view of gender relations and sexual mores that violate liberal values and practices in the democratic world. They are significantly less tolerant of gender equality, homosexuality, abortion and divorce than the Christian respondents in Western countries. Moreover, the data reveal that the older cohort of Muslim respondents is closer in values to their age cohorts in the West than the younger generation is to their age cohorts in the West, suggesting a trend of liberalization in Europe and stagnancy in the Islamic world.Footnote ¹⁴ To the extent that the traditional values of Muslims in the Muslim world transfer to Europe with migration, there is, as suggested by the authors, a foundation for an intra-European “clash of civilizations”.

Also lending support to Caldwell’s version of popular perceptions in Europe of an Islamic threat are Paul Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn whose careful experimental survey research techniques show a rather deep prejudice toward Muslim minorities. The authors believe this prejudice has become quite bitter after the political class (in a way described by Caldwell) treated the Muslim population no differently from any other immigrant group.Footnote ¹⁵

In contrast to these studies raising special concern about the particular difficulties of Muslim integration into Europe due to Muslim values and European prejudices, research exists that provides a more nuanced picture than those studies of Inglehart and Norris, and Sniderman and Hagendoorn. First is the survey research of Brouard and Tiberj in France.Footnote ¹⁶ They set out to discover if the popular stigmas about Muslim immigrants are supported by empirical data. They catalogue these stigmas about Muslim migrants in the fallowing way: (a) they want to Islamize French society; (b) their values are conservative in a liberal society, e.g. in wanting to keep women subordinate; (c) they are communitarians who want to ethnicize French politics; (d) they are poor and seek to profit from French social benefits; and (e) they pass on these values to their children.

One by one, they dismantle many of these stigmatized images. Their comparative data show that French immigrant Muslims are mostly infrequent Mosque goers, with only 22 percent worshipping at least once a month at a mosque, while three-quarters only frequent a mosque from time to time or on major holidays. This is more-or-less the same figure as for the general population in France going to Church (p. 24). On the issue of “re-Islamicization”, 42 percent of Muslim respondents say they now give more importance to religion than they did before (41 percent say equal, and 17 percent say less), and most say they are less religious than their parents (p. 30). Only 2 percent of Muslim respondents say they would refuse a dinner invitation from a non-Muslim, showing there is not a closed community of Muslims hostile to the host society. For the great majority, the authors find, Islam is a private matter with little consequence on becoming part of French society. A great majority of the respondents either approves or is willing to allow children what they want in regard to religiously mixed marriages, though somewhat less so for their daughters. On policy issues, Brouard and Tiberj find there is a great approval, among Muslims and French, of the concept of laïcité, which is “probably perceived as a principle of neutrality, protector of religious diversity and the minority sects” (pp. 37-38). On the issue of loyalty to the Republic, 88 percent of Muslim and 87 percent of the French sample had positive views. On economic policy, the surveys showed no difference between the immigrants and natives on their appreciation of the French economic system, from the right to strike to the right to set up a company. On the question as to whether the unemployed could find work if they really wanted to, the Muslim subsample of the immigrants interviewed was significantly more in agreement, both on the left and the right, than the mirror sample of French. The authors suggest (p. 72) that this shows that among Muslim immigrants there is a new cultural synthesis, one that connects attachment to work and success, with a much stronger ideology of the importance of work for success than among the French natives.

On cultural issues, the authors do find significant differences, but nowhere to the degree that a reading of Caldwell would have predicted from such a survey. On three questions, the authors find, immigrants are far less permissive than the French sample: they are less tolerant of homosexuality (39 percent of Muslims disagree compared to 21 percent of the French); of pre-marital sex for women (32 percent of Muslims disagree compared to 8 percent of the French); and the view that men and women should have separate opening hours at public swimming pools (43 percent of Muslims agree compared to 26 percent of the French). However, on the view that women’s main role is to have and raise children, there is no difference (33 percent of Muslims and 34 percent of the French agree). When broken down by age and education, the French are more tolerant of women in the workforce. But the authors caution that 41 percent of the Muslim sample took the tolerant position on all these questions, so the image of an intolerant bloc of Muslim immigrants is hardly accurate (pp. 86-87). However, on the issue of women, among the Muslims, 29 percent are permissives (those who are in accord with all the tolerance questions on the questionnaire); among the Catholics in the immigrant survey the figure is 57 percent, and in the French sample it is 52 percent. Among “practicing Catholics”, the level of permissiveness equals that of Muslims in general (practicing or not). As with the Norris and Inglehart finding, the effect of sexual intolerance does not weaken over the generations for Muslims. In fact it gets stronger the more the respondents believe they are better Muslims than their parents.

In sum, the Brouard and Tiberj surveys demonstrate broad similarities between Muslim and non-Muslim immigrants in France, and broad attachment by the subsample of Muslim immigrants to the Republic and republican values. In answer to the question in the title of their book – Français comme les Autres ? – their data would lead one to an answer “not radically different”.

Other social scientific research challenges Caldwell’s notion that all Europe is facing the same problem with no differences across countries; that is, that Muslims are the same everywhere and European states are all facing their threat with the same degree of ineptitude. Careful research by Fetzer and Soper shows considerable differences.Footnote ¹⁷ The authors study three major issues – mosque construction, state funding of Muslim education, and facilitation of Muslim religious practice – in Germany, the UK and France. They evaluate these issue areas on two dimensions: the legal constraints on the fulfillment of the expressed wishes of Muslim leadership and the range of everyday cultural constraints in schools and the labor market. They find that France is restrictive culturally but accommodating legally; Germany and the UK are the reverse. Thus the constraints faced by Muslims are not the same across Europe, with implications that research is just beginning to draw.

One of those implications is drawn out by Rafaela Dancygier.Footnote ¹⁸ She theorizes that when immigrants can back up their claims for scarce economic goods with pivotal votes, incumbents will curry favor with the new voting constituency. This bow to the immigrants is likely to anger native populations, who in turn are likely to challenge directly the immigrants, producing immigrant-native conflict. Conversely, if immigrants lack the vote, politicians abandon them. This abandonment surely satisfies the native poor, but it is likely to push immigrants into confrontations with the state authorities, especially the police. The observable implications of this theoretical stance are clear. Her data (for the French case) show that where immigrants are the swing voters (in a few French electoral districts) communal tensions are exacerbated, with greater success of National Front candidates especially in high unemployment areas; where immigrants have no electoral swing (which is often the case in heavily centralized France), the battle lines are drawn between gendarmes and immigrant gangs. Dancygier’s research therefore demonstrates that a generalized Islamophobia misses the local dynamics that drive opposition and conflict across Europe.

What can social science say about the security threat of a disaffected Islamic community in the heart of Europe? Carefully accumulated data reveal a more measured view than does Caldwell of the terrorist threat to Western interests coming from radical Islam. In the dataset compiled under the Worldwide Incidents Terrorist System (by the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center), there have been six significant terrorist attacks in Europe from 2004 through 2008, with half of them having lethal consequences: the train explosion in Spain on March 11, 2004, killing 191; the tube bombing in London on July 7, 2005, killing 52; and the murder of the Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, on November 2, 2004. While these events are horrible, and have not outraged the Muslim communities living in Europe as much as most indigenous Europeans would like, it would be wildly overreacting to generalize these attacks to an entire religious community. Social science research is increasingly demonstrating the success of everyday policing in delimiting the terrorist threat of radical Islamism.Footnote ¹⁹ We do not need to relinquish many of our civil liberties to sustain the present level of police-organized counter-terrorism.

Added to the picked nits, social science research, however limited, does not provide strong confirmation for Caldwell’s vision of the essence of Europe being challenged everywhere by a common Islamic force. There is considerable variation to be explained. Moreover, Caldwell’s fears about the Islamic security threat are not fully corroborated by the data on international terrorism.

Counter-vision

Social science aside, three points provide a sharper counter-vision to the one Caldwell proposes, and these points help tear apart the fabric he wove together with his accumulation of facts showing that European elites had better wake up to the clarion call of their voters and to the threats of an increasingly dangerous fifth column in the European heartland.

First, whether the aggressive pursuit of third world immigrants by Europe’s economic gurus designed to feed their expanding industrial economies in the post World War II era was too short-sighted – in trading short-term economic growth for long-term cultural challenge – is water under the bridge. Many analysts have argued, in contrast to Caldwell, that without these waves of job-hungry migrants, European states would not have been able to sustain their retirement obligations for their aging populations. But however you calculate the benefit/cost ratio of those momentous decisions, there is no way to turn the clock backwards; and it would be a shocking act of intolerance if the children of those immigrants and their families who reunited with them lost their welcome as equal citizens or permanent residents in the EU states.

Second, Caldwell regularly attributes the elite consensus towards accommodation with practices these very elites despise and see as threatening to the values of liberal society as naïve, spineless, or the result of collective guilt (for the Jewish holocaust). But before excoriating multiculturalism, we ought to examine Europe’s historical alternatives in the treatment of difference. Those alternatives do not look so attractive today. Let us consider the eras when Europeans asserted their cultural superiority to justify slavery, genocides and wars against separatists whether against “the idea of Spain” (leading to Franco’s attack on Republican Spain) or “greater Serbia” (in a justification for Milosevic’s attacks on Albanians in Kosovo). Why are these episodes not reflective of the “essence” of Europe? Should we not compare the costs of Kiplingesque (in the notion of a “white man’s burden”) assertiveness with those of multicultural spinelessness before abandoning the latter?

My third point is that Caldwell takes the language of appeasement as the sole evidence of the policy. Yet while he sometimes mentions that policies go beyond rhetoric, he too rarely examines the full policy packages deployed by European leaders. In actual policy terms, European leaders speak publicly of multiculturalism but, in conjunction with counter-terrorist units throughout the Western world, they target Muslim suspects for police surveillance, and direct their police forces to root out from immigrant communities (even minor) lawbreakers.

Caldwell takes elite statements of European responsibility for Muslim anger at face value. After quoting U.S. President Bush (cited earlier), Caldwell infers “By far the majority of politicians [...] profess the [...] certitude [...] that terrorism never overlaps with the Muslim religion”. By this measure, terrorism could, by definition, have nothing to do with Islam. Caldwell also quotes UK Prime Minister Tony Blair in the wake of the London bombings: “We know that these people act in the name of Islam but we also know that the vast and overwhelming majority of Muslims here and abroad are decent [...] who abhor terrorism every bit as much as we do”. Those politicians who blame Islam, Caldwell asserts, “are held up in the news media as paranoid and sinister bumpkins” (p. 280). Leaders believe in a moderate Euro-Islam even if this point of view is merely a “figment of their [...] politically correct imaginations” (p. 284). Thus Caldwell infers from the quoted statements that there is a collective and willful ignoring of the facts on the ground by Western political leaders. He quotes Jean de Maillard, a French magistrate that “You can’t graft local police on to a society that is so sick and broken and whose members are in open rebellion against society” (p. 138).

Yet he treats the fact of higher rates of incarceration of European Muslims (pp. 136, 274) as evidence only of the failure of the multicultural policies rather than the police vigilance of its Muslim communities as a counter-weight to the public statements of toleration. He points (on p. 267) to black anti-Semitic street gangs (e.g. on the Orthodox rue des Rosiers in Paris) as evidence of the non-integration of the “Tribu-Ka” members. He does note that the French banned the group in 2006, but he does not acknowledge that this was accomplished in a framework of police patrols complementing the rhetoric of inter-religious respect. Nor does he note that the French police have done so well in protecting this Jewish quarter, that it is now the home of the highest end retail establishments in the Marais district. Caldwell reports that, in 2006, the French interior ministry rescinded the security clearances of 43 baggage handlers at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport. Even if the radical organizations these handlers belonged to were radical Islamist, French authorities denied that Islam was the culpable party. One way to interpret this, as does Caldwell, is that of hypocritical naïvité, a rhetorical balloon that can be pierced by the ordinary voter. Another way to interpret this is that of a two-pronged policy – a rhetoric of respect along with an information gathering police force that will incarcerate those who take minimal advantage of that rhetoric. Caldwell reports on the systematic deportation of radical Islamist preachers in France and Britain (p. 346), again seeing this as too little, but not part of a dual package of multiculturalism and police surveillance.

Caldwell derides the small budget of Frontex, the transnational border guard preventing illegal immigration from Africa, and manned mostly by helicopters from Spain’s Guardia Civil (p. 69). But he refuses to see this policing as the complement to multiculturalism, and not merely as a further example of European insouciance concerning the problem of immigration.

Caldwell ends his diatribes against the political establishment in Europe in his faint praise of the early Sarkozy presidency in France. He sees its hypocrisy in the appointment of leading Muslim moderates to senior government positions along with a studied deportation policy of Muslims without papers as Nixonian in effective cynicism. So the naïve rhetoric and the co-opted moderates are useful as long as the police are arresting and deporting the racaille (the riff-raff), the name that Sarkozy gave to the rioters in 2005 while serving as Minister of the Interior. Caldwell seems to prefer the regeneration of the Ottoman millet system, where each nationality group had its own political space, separate from the others. But he does not (indeed could not) elaborate on this possibility, because it has no way of handling events and processes that cross the hypothetical millets. For all his back-handed respect for President Sarkozy, Caldwell does not come up with anything better than Nixonian hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy, however useful, is not necessary, given what we know about Muslims in Europe. The first point is that while there are complex accommodation issues that will continue to trouble European states in different ways, the modal immigrants are intent on incorporation into European societies. We do not know if accommodating to local Muslim practices (as in the Netherlands or the UK) or compelling Muslims to display their religious symbols only privately (as in France) yields faster accommodation or lower levels of violence. It would be useful to conduct research answering this question. But in either case, those intent on undermining the liberal values of contemporary Europe or engaging in violent confrontation with either natives or the police are at the very end of the distribution of the Muslim populations. This threat should not be ignored, because the religious fanaticism of a small minority and the incentives for them to ally with radical Muslim forces internationally are not trivial.

This is where police surveillance enters, with a premium on intelligence so that the police minimize harassment of young Muslim men who are pursuing their life opportunities peacefully. Stigmatizing the modal Muslim in response to the activities of extreme elements, as Caldwell’s analysis sometimes demands, can only exacerbate tensions and make Caldwell’s predictions self-fulfilling. To be sure, the radical Muslim threat requires an unprecedented level of surveillance that undermines to some extent the civil liberties of citizens living in liberal states. That is a cost we all must pay for living in a world where terrorist missionaries (and bacteria) can cross borders all too easily. But the threats of terrorism can be manageably contained without turning our countries into police states.

What is to be done? Rather than the rationalized Islamophobia that Caldwell offers, I propose a joint politics of welcoming the new Europeans with the expectation that most will buy into the European liberal project, with careful surveillance to assure all Europeans that those Islamicists – the radical tail of the immigrant population – who wish to use European freedom in order to undermine it will be identified and incarcerated.