Not all “right turns” arecreated equal.
by Bruce Bawer
When the New Left emerged in the 1960s, something else was born thatwould mark American elites for decades thereafter: the notion thatsocial-democratic Western Europe was far superior to the capitalistUnited States. Pity the poor American professor whose every junket to aEuropean academic conference was marred by his continental colleagues’sneering over cocktails about his nation’s shame du jour—Vietnam,Watergate, Iraq—or about American racism, capital punishment or healthcare. For much of the American left, Western Europe was nothing lessthan an abstract symbol of progressive utopia.
This rosy view was never accurate, of course. Europe’s socializedhealth care was blighted by outrageous (and sometimes deadly) waitinglists and rationing, to name just one example. To name another: Timbro,a Swedish think tank, found in 2004 that Sweden was poorer than all butfive U.S. states and Denmark poorer than all but nine. But in recentyears, something has happened to complicate the left’s fanciful pictureeven further: Western European voters’ widespread reaction againstsocial democracy.
The shift has two principal, and related, causes. The moresignificant one is that over the past three decades, social-democraticEurope’s political, cultural, academic and media elites have presidedover, and vigorously defended, a vast wave of immigration from theMuslim world—the largest such influx in human history. According toForeign Affairs, Muslims in Western Europe numbered between 15 millionand 20 million in 2005. One source estimates that Britain’s Muslimpopulation rose from about 82,000 in 1961 to 553,000 in 1981 to twomillion in 2000—a demographic change roughly representative of WesternEurope as a whole during that period. According to the London Times,the number of Muslims in the U.K. climbed by half a million between2004 and 2008 alone—a rate of growth 10 times that of the rest of thecountry’s population.
Yet instead of encouraging these immigrants to integrate and becomepart of their new societies, Western Europe’s governments have allowedthem to form self-segregating parallel societies run more or lessaccording to Shariah. Many of the residents of these patriarchalenclaves subsist on government benefits, speak the language of theiradopted country poorly or not at all, despise pluralistic democracy,look forward to Europe’s incorporation into the House of Islam, andsupport—at least in spirit—terrorism against the West. A 2006 SundayTelegraph poll, for example, showed that 40% of British Muslims wantedShariah in Britain, 14% approved of attacks on Danish embassies inretribution for the famous Mohammed cartoons, 13% supported violenceagainst those who insulted Islam, and 20% sympathized with the July2005 London bombers.
Too often, such attitudes find their way into practice. Ubiquitousyouth gangs, contemptuous of infidels, have made European citiesincreasingly dangerous for non-Muslims—especially women, Jews and gays.In 2001, 65% of rapes in Norway were committed by what the country’spolice call “non-Western” men—a category consisting overwhelmingly ofMuslims, who make up just 2% of that country’s population. In 2005, 82%of crimes in Copenhagen were committed by members of immigrant groups,the majority of them Muslims.
Non-Muslims aren’t the only targets of Muslim violence. A mountainof evidence suggests that the rates of domestic abuse in these enclavesare astronomical. In Germany, reports Der Spiegel, “adisproportionately high percentage of women who flee to women’sshelters are Muslim”; in 2006, 56% of the women at Norwegian shelterswere of foreign origin; Deborah Scroggins wrote in The Nation in 2005that “Muslims make up only 5.5 percent of the Dutch population, butthey account for more than half the women in battered women’sshelters.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch advocate for democracy andwomen’s rights, would no doubt say far more than half: Whenshe was working with women in Dutch shelters, she writes, “there werehardly any white women” in them, “only women from Morocco, from Turkey,from Afghanistan—Muslim countries—alongside some Hindu women fromSurinam.” When she and filmmaker Theo van Gogh tried to highlight themistreatment of women under Islam in the 2004 film “Submission: PartI,” he was killed by a young Muslim extremist.
More and more Western Europeans, recognizing the threat to theirsafety and way of life, have turned their backs on the establishment,which has done little or nothing to address these problems, and begunvoting for parties—some relatively new, and all consideredright-wing—that have dared to speak up about them. One measure of thedimensions of this shift: Owing to the rise in gay-bashings by Muslimyouths, Dutch gays—who 10 years ago constituted a reliable left-wingvoting bloc—now support conservative parties by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.
The other major reason for the turn against the left is economic.Western Europeans have long paid sky-high taxes for a social safety netthat seems increasingly not worth the price. These taxes have slowedeconomic growth. Timbro’s Johnny Munkhammar noted in 2005 that Sweden,for instance, which in the first half of the 20th century had theworld’s second-highest growth rate, had since fallen to No. 14, owingto enormous tax hikes.
Government revenues in Western Europe go largely to support theunemployed, thus discouraging work. Over the last decade or so, theoverall unemployment rate in the EU 15—that is, Western Europe—hashovered at about 2.5 to 3 points higher than in the United States. InFrance and Germany, it has ascended into the double digits (and thatwas before the global financial crisis that began in 2008). WesternEurope’s rate of long-term unemployment has consistently been severaltimes higher than America’s, denoting the presence of a sizableminority either permanently jobless or working off the books, often forfamily businesses, while collecting unemployment benefits.
These two factors—immigration and the economy—are intimatelyconnected. For while some immigrant groups in Europe, such as Hindusand East Asians, enjoy relatively low unemployment rates and healthyincomes, the largest immigrant group, Muslims, has become such a burdenthat governments have made extensive cutbacks in public services inorder to keep up with welfare payments—closing clinics and emergencyrooms, reducing staff in hospitals, cutting police and militaryspending, eliminating course offerings at public universities, and soon. According to a report issued last year by the think tankContribuables Associés, immigration reduces France’s economic growth bytwo-thirds. In 2002, economist Lars Jansson estimated that immigrationcost Swedish taxpayers about $27 billion annually and that fully 74% ofimmigrant-group members in Sweden lived off the taxpayers. And in 2006,the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise warned that Norway’spetroleum fund—which contains the massive profits from North Sea oilthat have made the nation rich—could wind up drained to cover outlaysto immigrants. (This in a country whose roads, as a report last yearindicated, are in worse shape than Albania’s.)
The past few decades in Europe have made three things crystal-clear.First, social-democratic welfare systems work best, to the extent theydo work, in ethnically and culturally homogeneous (and preferablysmall) nations whose citizens, viewing one another as members of anextended family, are loath to exploit government provisions for theneedy. Second, the best way to destroy such welfare systems is to takein large numbers of immigrants from poor, oppressive andcorruption-ridden societies, whose rule of the road is to grabeverything you can get your hands on. And third, the system will bewiped out even faster if many of those immigrants are fundamentalistMuslims who view bankrupting the West as a contribution to jihad. Addto all this the growing power of an unelected European Unionbureaucracy that has encouraged Muslim immigration and taken steps topunish criticism of it—criminalizing “incitement of racism, xenophobiaor hatred against a racial, ethnic or religious group” in 2007, forexample—and you can start to understand why Western Europeans who prizetheir freedoms are resisting the so-called leadership of theirsee-no-evil elites.
The November 2001 general election in Denmark is the mostdecisive—and successful—rejection so far of a Western Europeanleft-wing establishment. Alarmed by a widely publicized study showingthat their country would have a Muslim majority within 60 years ifimmigration rates didn’t change, Danish voters sent the SocialDemocrats down to defeat for the first time since 1924. The newLiberal-Conservative governing coalition, which voters returned topower in 2005, has introduced the Continent’s most sweeping immigrationand integration reforms, including rules designed to thwart thenear-universal practice in Europe’s Muslim communities of marryingone’s children off to cousins abroad so that they, too, may immigrateto the West. As a result, the flow of new Muslim arrivals has decreasedsignificantly, allowing the government to focus resources on theimmense challenge of trying to integrate Muslims already living inDenmark. Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen also defended free speechstrongly during the 2006 Muhammad cartoon crisis, standing firm whileMuslims around the world raged against Denmark and Western leadersbegged him to back down.
The rightward shifts in Europe most widely reported in the U.S. havebeen those in Germany, where Angela Merkel became chancellor in 2005,and in France, where Nicolas Sarkozy took over the presidency in 2007.Those developments, as well as the third term that Italian primeminister Silvio Berlusconi won in 2008, were grounded largely in publicrecognition of the need for economic liberalization. By Frenchstandards, Mr. Sarkozy’s campaign rhetoric was nothing less thanstunning: arguing that “the revolution of 1968″—a sacred event for theleft-wing French establishment—had not liberated France but “brought usinto moral decline,” Mr. Sarkozy insisted that if the French wantedgrowth, they needed to spend less time in cafés and more on the job.
In brave little Denmark’s backyard, two more countries have moved tothe right. In Norway, the Progress Party—which the political and mediaestablishment has smeared for a generation as racist and fiscallyunserious—now rivals the Labor Party, architect of the country’swelfare state, thanks to voter concerns about immigration and publicservices. Though the financial crisis had caused support for theProgress Party to slip a bit, recent Muslim riots and debates about hijabhave sent poll numbers skyward again, and the party seems a good bet tocome out on top in next September’s parliamentary elections—though itwill be in trouble if, as appears likely, other right-of-center partiesrefuse to join a Progress Party-led coalition. And in Sweden, perhapsthe ultimate symbol of social democracy, voters motivated largely byconcerns over unemployment and other economic issues unseated thelong-powerful Social Democratic Party in 2006. In its place theyinstalled a center-right coalition led by Fredrik Reinfeldt’sModerates, who promised to help businesses and lower taxes.
But demonstrating a distinctively European species of schizophrenia,many on both the right and the left, while acknowledging the need forwelfare-state reorganization, have ultimately resisted it—as if thephilosophical leap required were simply too great. In Western Europe,after all, even the mainstream right tends to be statist. “The conceptof the cradle-to-grave welfare state is so deeply embedded in theDanish psyche that even the conservatives don’t dare touch it,” notedNPR correspondent Sylvia Poggioli in 2006. Ivo H. Daalder made the samepoint in a 2007 Brookings Institution report, writing that “when onetalks about the right in Europe, you are talking about a very stateinterventionist political class that still believes that the governmenthas a fundamental role in guiding how the economy is supposed to berun.”
It’s no surprise, then, that Europe’s new leaders have maderelatively modest economic changes. True, Mr. Sarkozy has raised stateemployees’ retirement age (precipitating a transport strike) and endedFrance’s 35-hour workweek. But from the start, Social Democrats inGermany, whom Ms. Merkel’s slim margin of victory forced her to acceptas coalition partners, have limited her ability to implement seriouseconomic reforms. In April 2008, Judy Dempsey noted in theInternational Herald Tribune not only that the coalition had “run itscourse” but that Merkel herself had been “forced to move leftward,”hiking pensions and “rolling back radical labor reforms, ironicallyintroduced by her Social Democratic predecessor, Gerhard Schröder,which were designed to bring older people back to work by reducingsocial welfare payments.” And with the onset of the economic crisis,notes German author Henryk Broder, “there is even an ongoing discussionabout EnteignungVerstaatlichung [nationalization], which was unthinkable a year ago.” [expropriation] and
As for Sweden, shortly after the 2006 victory, BusinessWeek writersStanley Reed and Ariane Sains paraphrased Mr. Reinfeldt as saying thathis “idea isn’t to dismantle the cherished Swedish welfare state. . . .That would be too controversial.” Mr. Reinfeldt’s one major innovationhas been a “partially successful” effort “to force people off thewelfare rolls and into the labor market,” University of Lund socialthinker Jonathan Friedman tells me. Mr. Reinfeldt’s economic plan hasalso involved increased privatization, somewhat lower taxes, andencouragement of entrepreneurship—all policies, as Mr. Friedman notes,”that were started by the previous government.”
Meanwhile, with the notable exception of Denmark, the newnonsocialist governments have left their predecessors’ disastrousimmigration and integration policies almost entirely intact. Mr.Sarkozy’s defiant campaign rhetoric about Muslim rioters in the suburbsraised hopes for major change. But though he announced last July thatillegal immigration would be a major focus during France’s EUpresidency, he has done little even about legal immigration,most of which, in Western Europe, involves the importation of newspouses in arranged, usually forced, marriages. Mr. Sarkozy seems tobelieve that job creation and other economic measures will resolveFrance’s colossal integration challenges.
Ms. Merkel, meanwhile, shone briefly when she insisted that theDeutsche Oper proceed with a 2006 production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo”that Muslim leaders condemned as offensive. But the heavily hyped”national integration plan” that she introduced the following yearrested on such half-measures as an increase in the number ofgovernment-sponsored German classes, an effort to encourage immigrantsto play sports, and (incredibly) a program that addressedwife-beating—permitted by the Koran and extremely common in Muslimcommunities—by offering advice on the Internet. Ms. Merkel actuallydescribed these pathetic gestures as a “milestone”; Mr. Broder, moreaccurately, calls them “make-believe action,” another way to avoidconflicts in her coalition.
In Sweden, says Mr. Friedman, Mr. Reinfeldt has pursued “a variantof politics as usual” on immigration and integration. Lars Hedegaard,president of the International Free Press Society, insists that Swedishefforts to encourage employment “will undoubtedly prove ineffectiveover the long haul” because “the fundamental problem is demographics.Sweden remains Europe’s main importer of Muslim immigrants who areunwilling to assimilate and whose imams order them to detest Swedishculture. So long as the current government is unwilling to tackle thisbasic problem, everything else will be for naught.”
Mr. Sarkozy has undertaken one high-profile initiative, which seemsdisastrously ill-conceived in a uniquely Gallic way: developing closer,more formal ties between France and the Arab countries from which itreceives most of its immigrants. At one point, he even spoke of a”Mediterranean Union.” Haaretz writer Michalis Firillas summed up Mr.Sarkozy’s plan tidily in January 2008: “For some, his MediterraneanUnion is a containment policy. For others it is neocolonial. But thereis also a sense that Sarkozy is betting on French grandeur, that auraof greatness, to bridge the disparate Mediterranean with a new andserious political body. Unfortunately, he may find that there areothers with similar visions of grandeur, from Ankara to Cairo, fromJerusalem to Tangiers, who have their own Mediterranean visions.”Indeed, Mr. Sarkozy’s scheme appears to be a continuation of hisleft-wing predecessors’ efforts to bring the Arab world under Frenchinfluence—efforts that ended up subsidizing the colonization of Frenchsuburbs by Arabs who now consider them part of the House of Islam.
Not only has Europe’s move to the right not always had concreteresults; it also hasn’t been an across-the-board phenomenon. InBritain, the Tories seem poised to resume power after Labour’s long,slow decline. Yet the ideological gap between the parties has narrowedso much in recent years, and the leadership vacuum is so pronounced,that it’s difficult to imagine a Tory takeover’s having an impactremotely comparable with that of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election. Onthe contrary, conservative columnist Peter Hitchens recently chargedthat nowadays “you cannot become the government unless you bow to theviews of the ‘Centre-Left’ media elite, especially the broadcast mediaelite.” That elite, alas—as vividly demonstrated last year by thearchbishop of Canterbury’s speech contemplating the legitimacy ofShariah in parts of Britain—is bent on appeasing fundamentalist Islam.
And Spain, in a move widely seen as capitulating to Islamists,responded to the March 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid by voting forJosé Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s Socialist Party, which had vowed towithdraw troops from Iraq immediately. Mr. Zapatero narrowly wonre-election last year. As libertarian columnist Antonio Golmarexplains, the centrist consensus established after King Juan Carlos’sintroduction of democracy in the 1970s has been shattered by Mr.Zapatero’s hard-left initiatives. These include the Historical MemoryLaw—which portrays leftist mass murderers during the Spanish civil waras heroic freedom fighters, while stigmatizing many of their innocentvictims as fascists—and the introduction in all schools of”citizenship” classes that teach scorn for capitalism andrepresentative democracy.
In response, some Spaniards have lurched rightward toward thenational-Catholic, protofascist ideology of Franco’s time and becomeincreasingly vocal within the conservative Partido Popular.Consequently, says Mr. Golmar, “moderates in Spain are trapped betweena far-left administration and their cronies and the revival of theextreme right disguised in conservative and even libertarian clothing.”While America struggles to move beyond the antagonisms of the 1960s,then, Spain has entered an ideological battlefield reminiscent of theyears preceding its civil war of the late 1930s. There seems littleroom for those who loathe both the neo-Marxists and theneoreactionaries.
The situation in Spain is a reminder that not all “right turns” arecreated equal. If the Danes have affirmed individual liberty, humanrights, sexual equality, the rule of law, and freedom of speech andreligion, some Western Europeans have reacted to the mindlessmulticulturalism of their socialist leaders by embracing alternativesthat seem uncomfortably close to fascism. Consider Austria’s recentlydeceased Jörg Haider, who belittled the Holocaust, honored Waffen-SSveterans, and found things to praise about Nazism. In 2000, his FreedomParty became part of a coalition government, leading the rest of the EUto isolate Austria diplomatically for a time, and last September hisnew party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, won 11% of the votein parliamentary elections. Or take Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has calledthe Holocaust “a detail in the history of World War II” and advocatedthe forced quarantining of people who test HIV-positive—and whosefar-right National Front came out on top in the first round of votingfor the French presidency in 2002. The British National Party (BNP),which has a whites-only membership policy and has flatly denied theHolocaust, won more than 5% of the vote in London’s last mayoralelection. Then there’s Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), formerlyVlaams Bloc, whose leaders have a regrettable tendency to be caught onfilm singing Nazi songs and buying Nazi books. In 2007, it won 5 out of40 seats in the Belgian Senate.
For establishment politicians, journalists and academics, theseparties serve an exceedingly useful purpose: Their existence makes iteasy to tar any nonsocialist party with the fascistbrush—labeling it racist and xenophobic, equating its leaders with thelikes of Mr. Le Pen and Haider, and stigmatizing its supporters. Noparty in Europe has been subjected to more unfair attacks than Norway’sProgress Party, whose extraordinary electoral successes have outragedthat country’s socialist elite. Like other parties on what we may callEurope’s respectable right, the Progress Party has expressly distanceditself from parties like the National Front and Vlaams Belang. Yetdespite these disavowals, American media have routinely echoed theleftist establishment’s unjust calumnies.
A seminal example was a March 2002 New York Times article by MarliseSimons about Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch politician who, according to thearticle’s headline, was “Proudly Gay, and Marching the Dutch to theRight.” Though Ms. Simons acknowledged that Fortuyn criticized Islambecause it offered “no equality for men and women and because . . . theimams here preach in offensive terms about gays,” she nonethelessechoed the Dutch establishment’s characterization of him as a menace toDutch values, making sure to mention that he had been widely comparedwith Mussolini and Haider. A few weeks later, Fortuyn was murdered byan environmental fanatic taken in by similar claptrap.
The same kind of incendiary rhetoric that Dutch journalists usedagainst Fortuyn can now be seen in American left-wing coverage of anynonsocialist European party or politician. Typical was Gary Younge’s2007 piece in The Nation: “In Europe, It’s the Old Right That’s Full ofHate.” According to Younge, “the primary threat to democracy in Europeis not ‘Islamofascism’ . . . but plain old fascism. The kind wherebymostly white Europeans take to the streets to terrorize minorities.”This was nonsense on a breathtaking scale: Though the rise of partieslike the BNP is indeed distressing, the truth remains that for everyact of anti-Muslim violence in Europe, there are—to make an exceedinglyconservative guess—100 acts of Muslim-on-infidel violence.
Who will win the war for the soul of Western Europe? TheIslamofascists and their multiculturalist appeasers, many of whom seemto believe that their job is not to defend democracy but to help makethe transition to Shariah as smooth as possible? The nativistcryptofascists? Or Pim Fortuyn’s freedom-loving heirs? Interestingly,while Western Europeans have been heading in one direction, Americanshave chosen to go the other way, replacing a president more loathed bythe European elite than any in history with a man whom the same elitehas celebrated to an unprecedented degree, often depicting his electionas a mystical act of atonement for all of America’s past sins, real orimagined.
The final question, then, is whether the Western European left’scondescension toward America, and the American left’s habit of holdingWestern Europe up as a socialist paradise, can survive the combinationof Europe’s right turn and the elevation of Barack Obama. Stir in theinternational financial crisis, which will almost certainly cause asocioeconomic upheaval of untold dimensions in both hemispheres, and itseems reasonable to expect that the old pattern may be broken for good.Meaning that American professors will have a far less stressful time ofit at European cocktail parties—at least until Shariah comes along andforbids cocktails entirely.