Europe's Angry Muslims
By Robert S. Leiken
From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2005
Summary: Radical Islam is spreading across Europe among descendants
of Muslim immigrants. Disenfranchised and disillusioned by the failure
of integration, some European Muslims have taken up jihad against the
West. They are dangerous and committed -- and can enter the United States
without a visa.
Robert S. Leiken is Director of the Immigration and National Security
Program at the Nixon Center and a nonresident Fellow at the Brookings
Institution. He is the author of Bearers of Jihad? Immigration and National
Security After 9/11.
AN AMERICAN CONCERN
Fox News and CNN's Lou Dobbs worry about terrorists stealing across the
United States' border with Mexico concealed among illegal immigrants.
The Pentagon wages war in the Middle East to stop terrorist attacks on
the United States. But the growing nightmare of officials at the Department
of Homeland Security is passport-carrying, visa-exempt mujahideen coming
from the United States' western European allies.
Jihadist networks span Europe from Poland to Portugal, thanks to the spread
of radical Islam among the descendants of guest workers once recruited
to shore up Europe's postwar economic miracle. In smoky coffeehouses in
Rotterdam and Copenhagen, makeshift prayer halls in Hamburg and Brussels,
Islamic bookstalls in Birmingham and "Londonistan," and the
prisons of Madrid, Milan, and Marseilles, immigrants or their descendants
are volunteering for jihad against the West. It was a Dutch Muslim of
Moroccan descent, born and socialized in Europe, who murdered the filmmaker
Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam last November. A Nixon Center study of 373
mujahideen in western Europe and North America between 1993 and 2004 found
more than twice as many Frenchmen as Saudis and more Britons than Sudanese,
Yemenites, Emiratis, Lebanese, or Libyans. Fully a quarter of the jihadists
it listed were western European nationals -- eligible to travel visa-free
to the United States.
The emergence of homegrown mujahideen in Europe threatens the United States
as well as Europe. Yet it was the dog that never barked at last winter's
Euro-American rapprochement meeting. Neither President George W. Bush
nor Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice drew attention to this mutual
peril, even though it should focus minds and could buttress solidarity
in the West.
YOUR LAND IS MY LAND
The mass immigration of Muslims to Europe was an unintended consequence
of post-World War II guest-worker programs. Backed by friendly politicians
and sympathetic judges, foreign workers, who were supposed to stay temporarily,
benefited from family reunification programs and became permanent. Successive
waves of immigrants formed a sea of descendants. Today, Muslims constitute
the majority of immigrants in most western European countries, including
Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and the largest single
component of the immigrant population in the United Kingdom. Exact numbers
are hard to come by because Western censuses rarely ask respondents about
their faith. But it is estimated that between 15 and 20 million Muslims
now call Europe home and make up four to five percent of its total population.
(Muslims in the United States probably do not exceed 3 million, accounting
for less than two percent of the total population.) France has the largest
proportion of Muslims (seven to ten percent of its total population),
followed by the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom,
and Italy. Given continued immigration and high Muslim fertility rates,
the National Intelligence Council projects that Europe's Muslim population
will double by 2025.
Unlike their U.S. counterparts, who entered a gigantic country built on
immigration, most Muslim newcomers to western Europe started arriving
only after World War II, crowding into small, culturally homogenous nations.
Their influx was a new phenomenon for many host states and often unwelcome.
Meanwhile, North African immigrants retained powerful attachments to their
native cultures. So unlike American Muslims, who are geographically diffuse,
ethnically fragmented, and generally well off, Europe's Muslims gather
in bleak enclaves with their compatriots: Algerians in France, Moroccans
in Spain, Turks in Germany, and Pakistanis in the United Kingdom.
The footprint of Muslim immigrants in Europe is already more visible than
that of the Hispanic population in the United States. Unlike the jumble
of nationalities that make up the American Latino community, the Muslims
of western Europe are likely to be distinct, cohesive, and bitter. In
Europe, host countries that never learned to integrate newcomers collide
with immigrants exceptionally retentive of their ways, producing a variant
of what the French scholar Olivier Roy calls "globalized Islam":
militant Islamic resentment at Western dominance, anti-imperialism exalted
by revivalism.
As the French academic Gilles Kepel acknowledges, "neither the blood
spilled by Muslims from North Africa fighting in French uniforms during
both world wars nor the sweat of migrant laborers, living under deplorable
living conditions, who rebuilt France (and Europe) for a pittance after
1945, has made their children ... full fellow citizens." Small wonder,
then, that a radical leader of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France,
a group associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, curses his new homeland:
"Oh sweet France! Are you astonished that so many of your children
commune in a stinging naal bou la France [fuck France], and damn your
Fathers?"
As a consequence of demography, history, ideology, and policy, western
Europe now plays host to often disconsolate Muslim offspring, who are
its citizens in name but not culturally or socially. In a fit of absentmindedness,
during which its academics discoursed on the obsolescence of the nation-state,
western Europe acquired not a colonial empire but something of an internal
colony, whose numbers are roughly equivalent to the population of Syria.
Many of its members are willing to integrate and try to climb Europe's
steep social ladder. But many younger Muslims reject the minority status
to which their parents acquiesced. A volatile mix of European nativism
and immigrant dissidence challenges what the Danish sociologist Ole Waever
calls "societal security," or national cohesion. To make matters
worse, the very isolation of these diaspora communities obscures their
inner workings, allowing mujahideen to fundraise, prepare, and recruit
for jihad with a freedom available in few Muslim countries.
As these conditions developed in the late 1990s, even liberal segments
of the European public began to have second thoughts about immigration.
Many were galled by their governments' failure to reduce or even identify
the sources of insécurité (a French code word for the combination
of vandalism, delinquency, and hate crimes stemming from Muslim immigrant
enclaves). The state appeared unable to regulate the entry of immigrants,
and society seemed unwilling to integrate them. In some cases, the backlash
was xenophobic and racist; in others, it was a reaction against policymakers
captivated by a multiculturalist dream of diverse communities living in
harmony, offering oppressed nationalities marked compassion and remedial
benefits. By 2002, electoral rebellion over the issue of immigration was
threatening the party systems of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, and
the Netherlands. The Dutch were so incensed by the 2002 assassination
of Pim Fortuyn, a gay anti-immigration politician, that mainstream parties
adopted much of the victim's program. In the United Kingdom this spring,
the Tories not only joined the ruling Labour Party in embracing sweeping
immigration restrictions, such as tightened procedures for asylum and
family reunification (both regularly abused throughout Europe) and a computerized
exit-entry system like the new U.S. Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator
Technology program; they also campaigned for numerical caps on immigrants.
With the Muslim headscarf controversy raging in France, talk about the
connection between asylum abuse and terrorism rising in the United Kingdom,
an immigration dispute threatening to tear Belgium apart, and the Dutch
outrage over the van Gogh killing, western Europe may now be reaching
a tipping point.
GOING DUTCH
The uncomfortable truth is that disenfranchisement and radicalization
are happening even in countries, such as the Netherlands, that have done
much to accommodate Muslim immigrants. Proud of a legendary tolerance
of minorities, the Netherlands welcomed tens of thousands of Muslim asylum
seekers allegedly escaping persecution. Immigrants availed themselves
of generous welfare and housing benefits, an affirmative-action hiring
policy, and free language courses. Dutch taxpayers funded Muslim religious
schools and mosques, and public television broadcast programs in Moroccan
Arabic. Mohammed Bouyeri was collecting unemployment benefits when he
murdered van Gogh.
The van Gogh slaying rocked the Netherlands and neighboring countries
not only because the victim, a provocative filmmaker, was a descendant
of the painter Vincent, the Dutch's most cherished icon, but also because
Bouyeri was "an average second-generation immigrant," according
to Stef Blok, the chairman of the parliamentary commission reviewing Bouyeri's
immigration record. European counterterrorism authorities saw the killing
as a new phase in the terrorist threat. It raised the specter of Middle
East-style political assassinations as part of the European jihadist arsenal
and it disclosed a new source of danger: unknown individuals among Europe's
own Muslims. The cell in Hamburg that was connected to the attacks of
September 11, 2001, was composed of student visitors, and the Madrid train
bombings of March 2004 were committed by Moroccan immigrants. But van
Gogh's killer and his associates were born and raised in Europe.
Bouyeri was the child of Moroccan immigrant workers. He grew up in a proletarian
area of Amsterdam sometimes known as Satellite City because of the many
reception dishes that sit on its balconies, tuned to al Jazeera and Moroccan
television. Bouyeri's parents arrived in a wave of immigration in the
1970s and never learned Dutch. But Bouyeri graduated from the area's best
high school. His transformation from promising student to jihadist follows
a pattern in which groups of thriving, young European Muslims enlist in
jihad to slaughter Westerners.
After graduating from a local college and then taking advanced courses
in accounting and information technology, Bouyeri, who had an unruly temper,
was jailed for seven months on a violence-related crime. He emerged from
jail an Islamist, angry over Palestine and sympathetic to Hamas. He studied
social work and became a community organizer. He wrote in a community
newsletter that "the Netherlands is now our enemy because they participate
in the occupation of Iraq." After he failed to get funding for a
youth center in Satellite City and was unable to ban the sale of beer
or the presence of women at the events he organized, he moved to downtown
Amsterdam. There, he was recruited into the Hofstad Group, a cell of second-generation
Islamic militants.
The cell started meeting every two weeks in Bouyeri's apartment to hear
the sermons of a Syrian preacher known as Abu Khatib. Hofstad was connected
to networks in Spain, Morocco, Italy, and Belgium, and it was planning
a string of assassinations of Dutch politicians, an attack on the Netherlands'
sole nuclear reactor, and other actions around Europe. European intelligence
services have linked the cell to the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, which
is associated with the Madrid bombings and a series of attacks in Casablanca
in 2003. Its Syrian imam was involved with mujahideen in Iraq and with
an operational chief of al Qaeda. "Judging by Bouyeri's and the Hofstad
network's international contacts," an analyst for the Norwegian government
says, "it seems safe to conclude that they were part of the numerous
terrorist plots that have been unraveled over the past years in western
Europe."
The Hofstad Group should not be compared with marginal European terrorist
groups of the past, such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, Action
Directe in France, or the Red Brigades in Italy. Like other jihadist groups
today, it enjoys what Marxist terrorists long sought but always lacked:
a social base. And its base is growing rapidly, thanks in part to the
war in Iraq.
The Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) says that radical
Islam in the Netherlands encompasses "a multitude of movements, organizations
and groups." Some are nonviolent and share only religious dogma and
a loathing for the West. But AIVD stresses that others, including al Qaeda,
are also "stealthily taking root in Dutch society" by recruiting
estranged Dutch-born Muslim youths. An AIVD report portrays such recruits
watching jihadist videos, discussing martyrdom in Internet chat rooms,
and attending Islamist readings, congresses, and summer camps. Radical
Islam has become "an autonomous phenomenon," the AIVD affirms,
so that even without direct influence from abroad, Dutch youth are now
embracing the fundamentalist line. Much the same can be said about angry
young Muslims in Brussels, London, Paris, Madrid, and Milan.
THE RANK AND FILE
Broadly speaking, there are two types of jihadists in western Europe:
call them "outsiders" and "insiders." The outsiders
are aliens, typically asylum seekers or students, who gained refuge in
liberal Europe from crackdowns against Islamists in the Middle East. Among
them are radical imams, often on stipends from Saudi Arabia, who open
their mosques to terrorist recruiters and serve as messengers for or spiritual
fathers to jihadist networks. Once these aliens secure entry into one
EU country, they have the run of them all. They may be assisted by legal
or illegal residents, such as the storekeepers, merchants, and petty criminals
who carried out the Madrid bombings.
Many of these first-generation outsiders have migrated to Europe expressly
to carry out jihad. In Islamist mythology, migration is archetypically
linked to conquest. Facing persecution in idolatrous Mecca, in AD 622
the Prophet Muhammad pronounced an anathema on the city's leaders and
took his followers to Medina. From there, he built an army that conquered
Mecca in AD 630, establishing Muslim rule. Today, in the minds of mujahideen
in Europe, it is the Middle East at large that figures as an idolatrous
Mecca because several governments in the region suppressed Islamist takeovers
in the 1990s. Europe could even be viewed as a kind of Medina, where troops
are recruited for the reconquest of the holy land, starting with Iraq.
The insiders, on the other hand, are a group of alienated citizens, second-
or third-generation children of immigrants, like Bouyeri, who were born
and bred under European liberalism. Some are unemployed youth from hardscrabble
suburbs of Marseilles, Lyon, and Paris or former mill towns such as Bradford
and Leicester. They are the latest, most dangerous incarnation of that
staple of immigration literature, the revolt of the second generation.
They are also dramatic instances of what could be called adversarial assimilation
-- integration into the host country's adversarial culture. But this sort
of anti-West westernization is illustrated more typically by another paradigmatic
second-generation recruit: the upwardly mobile young adult, such as the
university-educated Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, or
Omar Khyam, the computer student and soccer captain from Sussex, England,
who dreamed of playing for his country but was detained in April 2004
for holding, with eight accomplices, half a ton of explosives aimed at
London.
These downwardly mobile slum dwellers and upwardly mobile achievers replicate
in western Europe the two social types that formed the base of Islamist
movements in developing countries such as Algeria, Egypt, and Malaysia:
the residents of shantytowns and the devout bourgeoisie. As in the September
11 attacks, the educated tend to form the leadership cadre, with the plebeians
providing the muscle. No Chinese wall separates first-generation outsiders
from second-generation insiders; indeed, the former typically find their
recruits among the latter. Hofstad's Syrian imam mentored Bouyeri; the
notorious one-eyed imam Abu Hamza al-Masri coached Moussaoui in London.
A decade ago in France, the Algerian Armed Islamic Group proselytized
beurs (the French-born children of North African immigrants) and turned
them into the jihadists who terrorized train passengers during the 1990s.
But post-September 11 recruitment appears more systematic and strategic.
Al Qaeda's drives focus on the second generation. And if jihad recruiters
sometimes find sympathetic ears underground, among gangs or in jails,
today they are more likely to score at university campuses, prep schools,
and even junior high schools.
THE IRAQ EFFECT
According to senior counterintelligence officials, classified intelligence
briefings, and wiretaps, jihadists extended their European operations
after the roundups that followed September 11 and then again, with fresh
energy, after the invasion of Iraq. Osama bin Laden now provides encouragement
and strategic orientation to scores of relatively autonomous European
jihadist networks that assemble for specific missions, draw operatives
from a pool of professionals and apprentices, strike, and then dissolve,
only to regroup later.
Typically these groups target European countries allied with the United
States in Iraq, as was proved by the Madrid bombings, the November 2003
attacks on British targets in Istanbul, as well as the lion's share of
some 30 spectacular terrorist plots that have failed since September 11.
In March 2004, within days of the London police chief's pronouncement
that a local terrorist attack was "inevitable," his officers
uncovered a plot involving nine British nationals of Pakistani origin
and seized the largest cache of potential bomb-making material since the
heyday of the Irish Republican Army. A few months later, Scotland Yard
charged eight second-generation South Asian immigrants, reportedly trained
in al Qaeda camps, with assembling a dirty bomb. Three of them had reconnaissance
plans showing the layout of financial institutions in three U.S. cities.
Several hundred European militants -- including dozens of second-generation
Dutch immigrants "wrestling with their identity," according
to the Dutch intelligence service -- have also struck out for Iraq's Sunni
Triangle. In turn, western Europe serves as a way station for mujahideen
wounded in Iraq. The Iraq network belongs to an extensive structure developed
by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, now formally bin Laden's sworn ally and the "emir"
of al Qaeda in Iraq. Recently unsealed Spanish court documents suggest
that at a meeting in Istanbul in February 2002, Zarqawi, anticipating
a protracted war in Iraq, began to lay plans for a two-way underground
railway to send European recruits to Iraq and Middle Eastern recruiters,
as well as illegal aliens, to Europe. Zarqawi also activated sleeper cells
established in European cities during the Bosnian conflict.
A chief terrorism investigator in Milan, Armando Spataro, says that "almost
all European countries have been touched by [Iraq] recruiting," including,
improbably, Norway, Switzerland, Poland, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic.
The recruitment methods of the Iraq network, which procures weapons in
Germany from Balkan gangs, parallels those for the conflicts in Chechnya
and Kashmir. Thanks to its state-of-the-art document-forging industry,
Italy has become a base for dispatching volunteers. And Spain forms a
trunk line with North Africa as well as a staging area for attacks in
"al Andalus," the erstwhile Muslim Spanish caliphate.
LAX POPULI
Although for some Europeans the Madrid bombings were a watershed event
comparable to the September 11 attacks in the United States, these Europeans
form a minority, especially among politicians. Yet what Americans perceive
as European complacency is easy to fathom. The September 11 attacks did
not happen in Europe, and for a long time the continent's experience with
terrorism mainly took the form of car bombs and booby-trapped trash cans.
Terrorism is still seen as a crime problem, not an occasion for war. Moreover,
some European officials believe that acquiescent policies toward the Middle
East can offer protection. In fact, while bin Laden has selectively attacked
the United States' allies in the Iraq war, he has offered a truce to those
European states that have stayed out of the conflict.
With a few exceptions, European authorities shrink from the relatively
stout legislative and security measures adopted in the United States.
They prefer criminal surveillance and traditional prosecutions to launching
a U.S.-style "war on terrorism" and mobilizing the military,
establishing detention centers, enhancing border security, requiring machine-readable
passports, expelling hate preachers, and lengthening notoriously light
sentences for convicted terrorists. Germany's failure to convict conspirators
in the September 11 attacks suggests that the European public, outside
of France and now perhaps the Netherlands, is not ready for a war on terrorism.
Contrary to what many Americans concluded during Washington's dispute
with Paris in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, France is the exception
to general European complacency. Well before September 11, France had
deployed the most robust counterterrorism regime of any Western country.
Irish terrorism may have diverted British attention from jihad, as has
Basque terrorism in Spain, but Algerian terrorism worked the opposite
effect in France.
To prevent proselytizing among its mostly North African Muslim community,
during the 1990s the energetic French state denied asylum to radical Islamists
even while they were being welcomed by its neighbors. Fearing, as Kepel
puts it, that contagion would turn "the social malaise felt by Muslims
in the suburbs of major cities" into extremism and terrorism, the
French government cracked down on jihadists, detaining suspects for as
long as four days without charging them or allowing them access to a lawyer.
Today no place of worship is off limits to the police in secular France.
Hate speech is rewarded with a visit from the police, blacklisting, and
the prospect of deportation. These practices are consistent with the strict
Gallic assimilationist model that bars religion from the public sphere
(hence the headscarf dispute).
Contrast the French approach to the United Kingdom's separatist form of
multiculturalism, which offered radical Arab Islamists refuge and the
opportunity to preach openly, while stepping up surveillance of them.
French youth could still tune into jihadist messages on satellite television
and the Internet, but in the United Kingdom open radical preaching spawned
terrorist cells. Most of the rest of Europe adopted the relaxed British
approach, but with less surveillance.
Now, the Madrid bombings and the van Gogh killing have strengthened the
hand of engaged politicians, such as Germany's Social Democratic interior
minister, Otto Schily, and the former French interior minister, Nicolas
Sarkozy, who leads the governing Union for a Popular Movement. They have
also prompted Brussels, London, Madrid, Paris, and The Hague to increase
resources and personnel devoted to terrorism.
In general, European politicians with security responsibilities, not to
mention intelligence and security officials who get daily intelligence
reports, take the harder U.S. line. Schily has called for Europe-wide
"computer-aided profiling" to identify mujahideen. The emergence
of holy warriors in Europe and the meiosis of radical groups once connected
to al Qaeda have prompted several European capitals to increase cooperation
on counterterrorism as well as their counterterrorism resources and personnel.
Yet a jihadist can cross Europe with little scrutiny. Even if noticed,
he can change his name or glide across a border, relying on long-standing
bureaucratic and legal stovepipes. After the Madrid bombings, a midlevel
European official was appointed to coordinate European counterterrorist
statutes and harmonize EU security arrangements. But he often serves simply
as a broker amid the gallimaufry of the 25 member states' legal codes.
Since the Madrid bombings, the Spanish Interior Ministry has tripled to
450 the number of full-time antiterrorism operatives, and the Spanish
national police are assigning a similar number of additional agents to
mujahideen intelligence. Spanish law enforcement established a task force
combining police and intelligence specialists to keep tabs on Muslim neighborhoods
and prison mosques. Similarly, special police cells are being organized
in each of France's 22 regions, stepping up the surveillance of mosques,
Islamic bookshops, long-distance phone facilities, and halal butchers
and restaurants.
The 25 EU members have also put into effect a European arrest warrant
allowing police to avoid lengthy extradition procedures. Despite widespread
concerns about possible privacy abuses, several EU countries have lowered
barriers between intelligence and police agencies since the van Gogh murder.
Germany aims to place its 16 police forces under one umbrella. In France,
Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, intelligence
and police officers meet with officials in state-of-the-art communications
centers, or "war rooms," to share information about interrogations,
informant reports, live wiretaps, and video or satellite pictures.
Still, counterterrorism agencies remain reluctant to share sensitive information
or cooperate on prosecutions. Measures proposed in the wake of the Madrid
attacks, such as a Europe-wide fingerprint and DNA database and biometric
passports, remain only that -- proposals. Fragmentation and rivalry among
Europe's security systems and other institutions continue to hamper counterterrorism
efforts. For nearly a decade, France has sought the extradition of the
organizer of several bombings in the Paris metro in the 1990s, but his
case languishes in the British courts to the anguish of the Home Office
as well as Paris.
The new mujahideen are not only testing traditional counterterrorist practices;
their emergence is also challenging the mentality prevailing in western
Europe since the end of World War II. Revulsion against Nazism and colonialism
translated into compassion toward religious minorities, of whatever stripe.
At first, Muslim guest workers were welcomed in Europe by a liberal orthodoxy
that generally regarded them as victims lacking rights. In some countries,
such as the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, that perspective spawned
a comprehensive form of multiculturalism. London's version verged on separatism.
While stepping up surveillance, the British authorities allowed Islamists
refuge and an opportunity to preach openly and disseminate rabid propaganda.
Multiculturalism had a dual appeal: it allowed these states to seem tolerant
by showering minorities with rights while segregating them from, rather
than absorbing them into, the rest of society. Multiculturalism dovetailed
with a diminished Western ethos that suited libertarians as well as liberals.
But now many Europeans have come to see that permissiveness as excessive,
even dangerous. A version of religious tolerance allowed the Hamburg cell
to flourish and rendered German universities hospitable to radical Islam.
Now Europeans are asking Muslims to practice religious tolerance themselves
and adjust to the values of their host countries. Tony Blair's government
requires that would-be citizens master "Britishness." Likewise,
"Dutch values" are central to The Hague's new approach, and
similar proposals are being put forward in Berlin, Brussels, and Copenhagen.
Patrick Weil, the immigration guru of the French Socialist Party, sees
a continental trend in which immigrant "responsibilities" balance
immigrant "rights."
The Dutch reaction to van Gogh's assassination, the British reaction to
jihadist abuse of political asylum, and the French reaction to the wearing
of the headscarf suggest that Europe's multiculturalism has begun to collide
with its liberalism, privacy rights with national security. Multiculturalism
was once a hallmark of Europe's cultural liberalism, which the British
columnist John O'Sullivan defined as "free[dom] from irksome traditional
moral customs and cultural restraints." But when multiculturalism
is perceived to coddle terrorism, liberalism parts company. The gap between
the two is opening in France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and
to some extent even in Germany, where liberalism stretched a form of religious
tolerance so much so that it allowed the Hamburg cell to turn prayer rooms
into war rooms with cocky immunity from the German police.
Yet it is far from clear whether top-down policies will work without bottom-up
adjustments in social attitudes. Can Muslims become Europeans without
Europe opening its social and political circles to them? So far, it appears
that absolute assimilationism has failed in France, but so has segregation
in Germany and multiculturalism in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
Could there be another way? The French ban the headscarf in public schools;
the Germans ban it among public employees. The British celebrate it. The
Americans tolerate it. Given the United States' comparatively happier
record of integrating immigrants, one may wonder whether the mixed U.S.
approach -- separating religion from politics without placing a wall between
them, helping immigrants slowly adapt but allowing them relative cultural
autonomy -- could inspire Europeans to chart a new course between an increasingly
hazardous multiculturalism and a naked secularism that estranges Muslims
and other believers. One thing is certain: if only for the sake of counterterrorism,
Europe needs to develop an integration policy that works. But that will
not happen overnight.
Indeed, the fissure between liberalism and multiculturalism is opening
just as the continent undergoes its most momentous population shift since
Asian tribes pushed westward in the first Christian millennium. Immigration
obviously hits a national security nerve, but it also raises economic
and demographic questions: how to cope with a demonstrably aging population;
how to maintain social cohesion as Christianity declines and both secularism
and Islam climb; whether the EU should exercise sovereignty over borders
and citizenship; and what the accession of Turkey, with its 70 million
Muslims, would mean for the EU. Moreover, European mujahideen do not threaten
only the Old World; they also pose an immediate danger to the United States.
A FINER SIEVE
The United States' relative success in assimilating its own Muslim immigrants
means that its border security must be more vigilant. To strike at the
United States, al Qaeda counts less on domestic sleeper cells than on
foreign infiltration. As a 9/11 Commission staff report put it, al Qaeda
faces "a travel problem": How can it move its mujahideen from
hatchery to target? Europe's mujahideen may represent a solution.
The New York Times has reported that bin Laden has outsourced planning
for the next spectacular attack on the United States to an "external
planning node." Chances are it is based in Europe and will deploy
European citizens. European countries generally accord citizenship to
immigrants born on their soil, and so potential European jihadists are
entitled to European passports, allowing them visa-free travel to the
United States and entry without an interview. The members of the Hamburg
cell that captained the September 11 attacks came by air from Europe and
were treated by the State Department as travelers on the Visa Waiver Program
(VWP), just like Moussaoui and Richard Reid, the shoe bomber.
Does that mean the VWP should be scrapped altogether, as some members
of Congress are asking? By no means. The State Department is already straining
to enforce stricter post-September 11 visa-screening measures, which involve
longer interviews, more staff, and more delays. Terminating the VWP would
exact steep bureaucratic and diplomatic costs, and rile the United States'
remaining European friends. Instead, the United States should update the
criteria used in the periodic reviews of VWP countries, taking into account
terrorist recruiting and evaluating passport procedures. These reviews
could utilize task forces set up in collaboration with the Europeans.
Together, U.S. and European authorities should insist that the airlines
require U.S.-bound transatlantic travelers to submit passport information
when purchasing tickets. Such a measure would give the new U.S. National
Targeting Center time to check potential entrants without delaying flight
departures. And officers should be stationed at check-in counters to weed
out suspects.
Europe's emerging mujahideen endanger the entire Western world. Collaboration
in taming Muslim rancor or at least in keeping European jihadists off
U.S.-bound airplanes could help reconcile estranged allies. A shared threat
and a mutual interest should engage media, policymakers, and the public
on both sides of the Atlantic. To concentrate their minds on common dangers
and solutions might come as a bittersweet relief to Europeans and Americans
after their recent disagreements.
www.foreignaffairs.org is copyright 2002--2005
by the Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.
Retur
til artikeloversigt om kultursammenstød
|