Civilization’s Crisis and Europe’s Choices
Ideology, Intolerance, and Identity
When Samuel Huntington published his “Clash of Civilizations” essay in Foreign Affairs Magazine in the summer of 1993, it generated more correspondence with the editors of the journal than almost any piece that had previously been written for it. That was in the US alone. Overseas, the article was talked over and dissected by a very wide variety of intellectual critics. In much of the Islamic world, it was regarded as a confirmation of many Muslims’ worst suspicions: the “Crusaders”—a term much used today in a derogatory sense by Islamists and intellectual sympathizers with the Islamist agenda to denote the West and its allies—were back. The West, many suspected, having won the Cold War against the godless Soviet Union, was now about to extend its corrupt, materialistic, decadent hegemony over the rest of the world.
The “Clash of Civilizations” essay, later expanded into a book, took as its intellectual premise the notion that ideologies had become, in the last decade of the twentieth century, dead. In another influential essay four years earlier in National Interest magazine, former State Department official Francis Fukuyama had written an even more provocative piece, “The End of History,” essentially interpreting the struggle between totalitarianism and liberal democracy in Hegelian terms. The “end of history,” Fukuyama spelled out in the essay, was a post-totalitarian, liberal, internationalized world in which the ideals that had energized the West for so many decades had finally prevailed over the globe. Fukuyama + Huntington provided an intellectual synthesis: ideology, especially totalitarian ideology, was a thing of the past. What would now emerge, the synthesis held, was an evolutionary flow (Fukuyama) into a world-civilizational norm (Huntington) of Anglo-Saxon–style democracy.
The Phoenix and the Ostriches
What was not foreseen by either of these very talented intellectuals was that ideology, like the legendary phoenix, had risen from the ashes of discredited Marxism-Leninism in a new garb that made it potentially far more deadly. The new garment was religion, and specifically a militant, exclusionary, triumphalist branch of Islam. The word “Islamist” was carefully crafted in the 1990s to denote the then-new phenomenon of a way of thinking that characterized Sunni Muslims who sought to achieve state power in countries governed by post-independence native secular elites: North African regimes from Morocco to Egypt, but with particular emphasis on Algeria, where the threat of Islamist rule in the early 1990s seemed dire.
But “Islamist” was an inadequate word to describe the thinking of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers in the second half of the 1990’s. What became prominent in the writing of bin Laden and others championing his political viewpoint was that the end-goal of the emergent form of “Islamism” was not simply a shariah-law regime in countries where Muslims held power, but a new global caliphate of Islamic hegemony. The new mode of thinking was totalitarian, but obviously not Marxian. It was, in effect, fascist, for it envisaged the subordination of all areas of political, economic, legal, social, and cultural life to state political power in the hands of a Muslim elite. Early in the twenty-first century observers began calling this ideology “Islamofascism.” In the summer of 2006, following the uncovering in the UK of a plot to blow up several US-bound aircraft flying out of London’s Heathrow airport, President Bush used a closely similar phrase, “Islamic fascism.”
In Europe, the term was bleeped out of media discourse. When one critic of Islamist militance used it on a BBC interview, the interview was promptly terminated.
Europe’s problem with the Islamic militance that has fostered terrorism in many countries of the continent—the UK, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, to name the few most obvious—springs from what many critics regard as a culture of denial. Since the end of World War II, educational and intellectual elites in Europe have seen racism and xenophobia as the principle social attitudes to combat in the name of an enlightened social climate in their countries. In this view they were surely influenced by the fact that Europe’s most recent truly destructive blight was caused by Nazi racism before and during the war.
During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, many on the left of the intellectual spectrum tried to stay aloof from the ideological duel between American democratic capitalism and Soviet Communist totalitarianism, either sympathizing mildly with the Soviets or pretending to themselves that there was something approaching moral equivalence between Washington and Moscow. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, European intellectuals were relieved, but they were not any more sympathetic to the Judeo-Christian values by which US conservatives liked to identify themselves than they had been during the Cold War. The European “Project,” as advocates of a powerful and independent Europe sometimes called the process of constructing a supranational European entity, would be secular, tolerant, and multicultural.
As Robert Kagan noted in his short, but incisive book, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (Vintage 2004), that benign attitude towards the possibilities of development within Europe’s borders depended implicitly on the defense of Europe by the US against “barbarian” forces on the outside, against which Europe would not be able, by itself, to defend itself. Europeans have been unwilling to forego the generous social services their governments have supported in order to construct a credible military bulwark against potentially hostile forces on the outside. Europe, especially its central, economically prosperous core of France, Germany, Italy, and the UK, has nurtured its contemporary core values of tolerance and conciliation in a setting where it has not had to defend itself from hostile outsiders trying to undermine those very values.
Intolerant of Tolerance
With the influx of millions of immigrants from largely impoverished Muslim countries outside of Europe—often attracted by the very welfare prosperity in which Europe has taken pride—those values have themselves come under attack.
Muslim immigrant communities in virtually all the member nations of the European Union have steadily grown in both size and the militance of demands that their host societies adjust to their own cultural demands. Unwilling, as generations of immigrants to the US have always been, to subordinate their own social preferences to those of the societies in which they have settled, they have become progressively less tolerant of the very tolerance that has been extended to them.
In the face of this rejection of “Europeanness,” European intellectual elites have had difficulty responding. They assumed that “tolerance” was a self-evident social virtue, the natural outgrowth of a secular society that, by and large, had come to reject the absolutes and the certainties of Christianity—and indeed of all religions. But with every concession to Islamic demands for the Islamicization of institutions and traditions in Europe, they discovered that no concession was ever adequate.
It is often said that the vast majority of Muslims in Europe—and in France the percentage may well be more than 10 percent of the total population of 60.5 million—is opposed to terrorism and to the Islamofascism advocated by Iran and Al Qaeda. That is surely true. But the generalization overlooks the fact that, in those countries deemed most tolerant towards Muslims by Muslims, the percentage of those intellectually supportive of terrorist acts is frighteningly high.
In the UK, a recent poll revealed that 40 percent of the Muslim population favored the imposition of the shariah, or Islamic law, in parts of the country, and 20 percent actually felt sympathy for the terrorists who bombed the London Underground mass transit system in 2005. The radicalization process, as Saudi academic observer Dr. Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi (herself obviously a Muslim) noted, is particularly intense at British universities, where Muslim women are often required to be segregated from both Muslim and non-Muslim men in spite of university regulations against discrimination. “It’s a cultural thing,” British intellectuals sometimes say in defense of Islamic social practices that run counter to the ideas of tolerance, as if “tolerance” were a concept applicable only to white Europeans.
Islam is a proselytizing faith that historically has extended tolerance to people of different faiths only if they submit to a subordinate “dhimmi” status in society. In the entire world today there is not one Muslim-majority country that is genuinely pluralistic. Even in Turkey, a self-consciously secular state since the time of the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Attaturk (1881–1938), Christians are often harassed and severely restricted in what they can do. Turkey’s human rights record is a major obstacle in its aspirations to join the EU. Islamic aspirations for Europe, whether voiced by Islamic leaders outside of the continent or by Islamic community leaders inside it, are unabashedly to Islamicize the entire continent little by little. Already in France there are “no-go” areas in Muslim communities where French officials are unwilling to interfere because they tacitly accept the application there of Islamic law, or shariah, as opposed to French law. Professor Bernard Lewis, a leading scholar of Islamic studies in the US, has openly predicted that Europe might be an Islamic continent by the end of the twenty-first century.
It is highly improbable that the “soft tolerance” of European societies to the militant Islamic communities within them will either ameliorate the militance or lead to any effective antidote to it. European tolerance has been based on a post-Christian secular consensus that all religions are basically alike, that religion in general ought to be a thing of the cultural past, and that Christianity in particular, with its awkward demands for clear moral positions on complicated issues, is a nuisance.
Of course, there is always the danger of a xenophobic, nativist backlash against immigrants in general. In the past, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded France’s extreme right-wing National Front Party, targeted immigrants with his inflammatory rhetoric. Those immigrants, of course, included Muslims. But as French society turned more openly against Israel—and more surreptitiously against Jews in its midst—than against Muslim immigrants, Le Pen began to move towards a de facto alliance with France’s most militant Islamic groups. They, after all, were most vociferously against Israel and the Jews of France.
In Great Britain, the British National Party, another right-wing group, did something similar, advising its followers to read left-wing newspapers like The Guardian in order to apprise themselves of how far British Jews were, allegedly, exerting control over British society. In effect, Europe’s intellectual climate of anti-Zionism, moral equivalence on international issues, and extreme sensitivity to charges of “Islamophobia” has rendered the process of Islamic infiltration into the cultural and institutional core of Europe easier for Islamists than it ever was.
Searching for a Rudder
Is there a realistic way of turning around the European climate of permissive multiculturalism and appeasement to Islamic militance? It depends what is meant by “realistic.”
Even without the Islamic challenge, Europe has in many respects lost its historical cultural identity because of its repudiation of so many of its traditional values. At the core of the malaise, as George Weigel perceptively noted in The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God (Basic Books 2005) is the decision of the European intelligentsia over two centuries or so consciously to have turned against Christianity. From the refusal to acknowledge the Christian ingredient in Europe’s cultural evolution in the European Union’s proposed constitution to an almost breathtaking public disdain for any religious discourse throughout the continent, European intellectuals appear to have made a philosophical choice: anything but Christianity.
Europeans, of course, have done this before. They have appeared at previous historical times to have taken leave of their Christian origins. Yet sometimes, that move in a secular direction, in the past, has been reversed. The impact of the Wesleyan revival—through the travels all over the UK of Methodist evangelists—on the cultural and moral condition of Britain is a major example of the “re-Christianization” of British culture. Between approximately 1750 and a century later the country went through an amazing social, cultural, political, and spiritual renewal.
At the beginning of the period there was widespread political corruption the length and breadth of Britain, a dangerously high crime rate, frequent public executions (which deterred few people from crime), and a moral squalor in much of daily life. By about 1850 the country had gone through such a dramatic moral renewal that visitors from the Continent were amazed by the degree of high moral purpose they encountered whenever they arrived in Victorian England. There is little doubt that Britain’s global imperial mission—however self-serving and at times oppressive it may have been—was rendered possible by the cultural self-confidence that the re-evangelization of England accomplished.
Could the re-evangelization of the Continent of Europe be accomplished? Perhaps. The degree of commitment of missionaries, and of native-born European evangelists, not just over a decade, but over a lifetime, would have to be gargantuan. Nothing less would reverse the course towards ever-greater secularism on the one hand and ever-greater Islamicization on the other.
There is, in fact, some evidence of increased Christian missionary efforts on European soil. The largest Christian church in Europe is a Protestant megachurch in Ukraine, and it is led by a Nigerian who arrived in Kiev in the early 1990s as a student. In London, some of the most vibrant Christian gatherings are composed largely of African-descent Christians from the Caribbean. There are missionaries to the UK from Africa. It is one of the rich ironies of our time that the descendants of African converts evangelized by English missionaries in the nineteenth century are, in the twenty-first century, attempting to reintroduce Christianity to Europe, the world’s new “Dark Continent,” at least from the perspective of receptivity to the Christian message. Whether these efforts at replanting the seed of Christianity in European soil will bear lasting fruit isn’t clear yet.
Changing the direction of one of the world’s once most dynamic—and now most fatigued—civilizational sources is like changing the course of a supertanker in mid-ocean. The first moves of the rudder seem to have a barely perceptible impact on the ship’s direction. It seems impossible that the behemoth of several hundred thousand tons can be moved to a new course. But little by little, the compass direction of the horizon responds to the rudder moves. After pressing the ship into a turn for what must seem like eons, the helmsman eventually notices definite evidence of success. The direction that was earlier that of the sunset now is the direction of a new dawn. The ship has been completely turned around.
But it takes great strength and the persistence of a Job to keep the rudder turning until the ship faces a new direction. Do Christians outside of Europe have the willingness to take up the challenge and revivify their brothers and sisters on the Continent? We must wait to see.
Dr. Aikman is a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum and writer in residence at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. His website is www.davidaikman.com.
Features, Faiths and Worldviews, Good and Evil, Society, David Aikman, Tue 05 Dec 2006
