The New Road to Serfdom (12 page)

Whenever one of these cases occurs, critics tend to attribute blame in one of two ways. Some blame Muslims, arguing that they have failed to integrate with Western society. Others blame Western governments for pursuing provocative foreign wars.

To see why neither side is right, consider the story of America’s Muslims. There are more practitioners of Islam in America than in Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands combined. While the United States doesn’t keep religious census data, most estimates range between 2.5 million and 4.5 million, depending on how many devotees of the various African American Muslim movements established in the twentieth century are counted as orthodox Muslims.

If those who blame the disaffection of European Muslims on Western foreign policy were right, one would expect a similar disaffection among their American co-religionists. After all, if Britain is damned by radical mullahs for allying itself with the United States, how much more terrible must be the Great Satan itself?

Yet, in the decade since the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, repeated surveys have all indicated the same thing: that American Muslims are patriotic, that they feel lucky to be living in the United States, and that, while some complain of
discrimination, the overwhelming majority enjoy excellent community relations. Indeed, as the survey below conducted by Pew Research in 2007 suggests, American Muslims are generally more pro-American than their non-Muslim neighbors.

The United States, of course, prides itself on its success in integrating newcomers. The country was, in a
sense, designed for that purpose, and American nationality, as we saw in chapter 1, has always been a civic rather than an ethnic or religious concept. Anyone can become an American by buying in to American values. It’s a heartening creed, and one to which immigrants from every continent have subscribed. As Ronald Reagan put it, in a characteristically upbeat phrase: “Each immigrant makes America more American.”

The United States, in short, gives all its citizens, including its Muslim citizens, something to believe in. There is no need to cast around for an alternative identity when you are perfectly satisfied with the one on your passport.

In most of Europe, however, patriotism is seen as outdated and discreditable. The EU is built on the proposition that national identities are arbitrary, transient, and ultimately dangerous. Indeed, even the passports have been harmonized: The stiff blue British passport has been replaced by a floppy purple EU one. European countries make little effort to inculcate national loyalty in their immigrant communities, because they feel no such loyalty themselves. I am not speaking here of the general population, but of the political and intellectual leaders, who have systematically derided and traduced the concept of patriotism for the past forty years.

I can talk with most authority about my own country, although the experience of neighboring European states is comparable. People sometimes talk of British
Islam as if were a new phenomenon. In fact, during the nineteenth century, there were hundreds of millions of British Muslims.

In the early days of World War I, the Cabinet fretted about their loyalty. It was becoming clear that the United Kingdom would soon find itself in a state of war with Ottoman Turkey, then the world’s leading Muslim power. “What will be the effect on our Mussulmans in India and Egypt?” asked the Committee of Imperial Defense. The Ottoman Sultan, after all, was not simply the head of the world’s most important Muslim state; he was also the Caliph of Islam, Commander of the Faithful.

The question was answered soon enough. The war with Turkey caused most British Muslims no disquiet whatever. On the contrary, they volunteered in the millions, and served with distinction in Europe as well as the Middle East. One or two Egyptian radicals tried to turn the war with Turkey into another anti-colonial argument but, in those days, the idea that there was a tension between a man’s religious conviction and his civic loyalty struck most Muslims as bizarre.

What has changed? Two things. First, there have been changes within Islam. The 1979 Iranian Revolution one day will be seen as an epochal event, on a par with the French Revolution of 1789 or the Russian Revolution of 1917. Like them, it immediately burst out from behind its borders, seeking to replicate itself around the world. Like them it refused to recognize the
legitimacy of the international order, claiming a higher authority than the law of nations. The ayatollahs did not develop the doctrine that devout Muslims could not be wholly loyal to non-Muslim states, but they popularized it.

Perhaps the more significant change, however, has taken place within Europe. The reason that millions of British Muslims fought for the Crown in two world wars is because Britishness was a powerful brand, an identity they wanted to adopt.

The troubled young men who set out from Beeston and Wanstead and Tipton to become terrorists had been reared by the British welfare state. One might have thought that their great-grandfathers had greater cause to resent the United Kingdom, which had, after all, invaded and occupied their homelands. But, paradoxically, it was precisely this demonstration of power and confidence that facilitated their loyalty.

“Thou must eat the White Queen’s meat, and all her foes are thine,” Kipling’s border chieftain tells his son, “and thou must harry thy father’s hold for the peace of the Border-line. And thou must make a trooper tough and hack thy way to power. Belike they will raise thee to Ressaldar when I am hanged in Peshawur!”

Compare that to the experience of a young Muslim growing up in one of Britain’s inner cities. To the extent that he was taught any British history, it will have been presented to him as a hateful chronicle of
racism and exploitation. Most of his interactions with the state will have taught him to despise it. Nor will he get much encouragement from his country’s leaders. As British identity is scorned, the inhabitants of its constituent nations have begun to grope backward toward older patriotisms: Welsh, Scottish, or English. But where does this leave the children of immigrants?

As for the notion that he will feel grateful to the country that provides a generous welfare system, this is wholly to misunderstand human nature. Two of the London Tube bombers had been living on benefits, as many of the radical imams around Europe have always done.

The idea that poverty is a breeding ground for violence and terrorism derives, ultimately, from Karl Marx and, like most of his teachings, it sounds plausible enough until you stop to analyze it. Revolutionary violence, historically, has tended to occur, not at times of deprivation, but at times of rising wealth and aspiration. Put bluntly, people who are worried about where the next meal is coming from have little time for protest marches, let alone bomb-making.

The modern welfare state, by contrast, is the ideal terrorist habitat. It keeps people fed but idle. And, naturally, it makes them resent their paymasters.

Sean O’Callaghan, a former IRA volunteer, recalls talking to the terrorist leader Brian Keenan. “The Brits are very clever,” Keenan told him. “The only thing they
don’t get is the Fenian thing. We speak their language, are the same skin color, live in their council houses, take their dole, and still hate them.” But might it not have been precisely because of the council houses and the dole that they hated us? It is one thing to have a quarrel with another people, quite another to have to crawl to your enemies for charity.

To put it another way, had the London Tube bombers not had the option of welfare, they might have found productive jobs, instead of working themselves into a rage against the system that doled out their allowances.

It is the same story across Europe. As national self-confidence has waned, other identities have become more attractive. The Anglo-Dutch writer Ian Buruma has written a magisterial book about the killing of Theo Van Gogh,
Murder in Amsterdam.
While writing it, he toured the “dish cities”: the immigrant suburbs that ring Dutch towns, so named for the satellite dishes that connect the inhabitants to their ancestral countries.

Although he hands down few hard conclusions, Buruma offers some intriguing insights. For most Muslims in Europe, the central fact of their identity is not that they are Muslims, but that they are children of immigrants. Like second-generation settlers everywhere, they feel torn between the country where they grew up and the sunlit land of their parents’ reminiscences. Some of them become literally schizophrenic:
Personality disorders are ten times more common among second-generation Dutch Moroccans than among the indigenous people.

There is nothing peculiarly Muslim about mild deracination. Every second-generation immigrant feels it, even in America. I was born into the then sizeable British community in Lima and remember, as a six-year-old, agonizing over whether to support Peru or Scotland in the 1978 soccer World Cup. True, I never took up arms for the old country, but my father did. Like almost all the Anglo—South American boys of his generation, he left the land of his birth to fight Hitler. No one suggested, on his return, that he no longer had the right to live loyally and peaceably among Peruvians.

Which brings us back to the U.S. experience. Clever and fashionable Europeans mock the profusion of flags on American porches. When anti-Americans express themselves through posters or cartoons, they do so by parodying the symbols of American patriotism: red-white-and-blue bunting, Uncle Sam, stars-and-stripes hats. Yet it is these expressions of national togetherness—or, rather, the sentiment that produces them—that have made the assimilation of immigrants so much more successful than in Europe. As long as Americans believe in themselves, others will believe in them, too. As Toby says of the Muslim radicals in
The West Wing:
“They’ll like us when we win.”

Certainly that has been the European experience. Confident countries have little difficulty infecting others with their confidence. But when the ruling idea in Europe is that the nation-state is finished, and that we should hand what is left of our sovereignty to the Brussels bureaucracy, it is little wonder that settlers scorn their new homelands.

In order to sustain its population, and to keep the ratio of workers to retirees stable, the EU will absorb perhaps a hundred million immigrants over the next half century. Its leaders can hardly blame them if they have their own ideas about how to remake society when those leaders themselves seem to offer nothing better.

DON’T ABANDON FEDERALISM

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The diverse Euro-woes identified in this chapter gush from a single spout. All of them are caused, or at least exacerbated, by the phenomenon of large and remote government. Other things being equal, big and centralized states are likelier than small and devolved states to: be sclerotic; have more bureaucrats and higher taxes; have soulless and inefficient welfare systems; crowd out non-state actors, from churches to families; and have fatalistic and cynical electorates.

To put it the other way around, the devolution of power stimulates growth, makes administration more democratic, connects citizens to their nation, and allows a flourishing private sphere: the attribute that Tocqueville most admired about America.

Consider the example of Switzerland, one of the wealthiest and most successful states in Europe. America’s Founding Fathers were much taken with the Helvetic Confederation. John Adams admired the way the Swiss had developed universal suffrage and a popular militia. Patrick Henry praised the country for maintaining its independence without a standing army or a “mighty and splendid President.”

Switzerland, of course, is made up of twenty-six autonomous cantons. Like the United States, but unlike almost every country in Europe, it makes regular use of referendums as a method of government. In consequence, Swiss voters feel little of their neighbors’ political disaffection: They know that their system of direct democracy has served to control their politicians and to constrain the growth of government.

Interestingly, it has also served to foster a strong sense of national identity. Switzerland has four official languages, yet its burghers are united by strong national sentiment. Three times since 1870, France and Germany have fought atrocious wars against each other, but never once did these conflicts spill over into unrest between French- and German-speaking Swiss citizens.

Switzerland, like most European countries, has absorbed a sizeable immigrant population. But direct democracy ensures that Swiss people have a degree of control over whom they are admitting and in what numbers. In some cantons, immigration applications are voted on
as individual cases:
Those seeking naturalization are invited to submit a photograph and a short essay setting out why they should be allowed to stay. Sure enough, the ones allowed in tend to be the ones who have demonstrated their willingness to integrate.

No wonder the Swiss have refused to join the EU. They know that their unique system of dispersed democracy and popular sovereignty would be incompatible with Euro-centralization.