Old friend and now Time macher, Michael Elliott, sends a really smart email about the Fortuyn business. Worth reprinting here in full:
More generally, I agree with all that you and others have said about the lazy way in which Fortuyn was pigeonholed. But apart from the PCness of some of the European media (though not all of it) I suspect there’s something else going on here. Without excusing European journos, there is a history of clever, elegant European politicians attracting a pretty rough crowd of followers. Enoch Powell, on the occasions that I met him when covering politics for The Economist, was quite the most urbane, intelligent politician in Westminster, if sometimes a bit dotty. But like it or not, his pronoucements on race in the 1960s encouraged a climate of genuine fear among immigrants to Britain; and that sense of fear was just exacerbated by the habits of some of his supporters. Haider, whom I’ve met, is polished, well-dressed, “loves New York,” witty, rightly dismissive of the semi-corrupt carve-up of spoils among Austrian’s mainstream politicians – but equally plainly, not averse to the odd, sly, bit of anti-Jewish posturing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. I’m not defending the European media here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of its members – perhaps those without a deep knowledge of The Netherlands – “read” Fortuyn just by looking at some of his Rotterdam supporters. (Rotterdam is not Amsterdam.)
A second point is more fundamental. The policies that Fortuyn advocated aren’t new, and we shouldn’t pretend that they are. In fact, Fortuyn’s central take – that immigrants should assimilate to the values of the host country – is precisely what official French policy has been for years. The French line has always been that if you want to live in France, you become French – you learn French, you learn about the Gauls, Napoleon, Racine and Corneille at school, you eat baguettes, you celebrate the quatorze juillet, you stand for the Marseillaise etc etc. You respect “republican values” – including secularism – and you don’t wear hijabs to school. In all these respects, French policy is markedly different from the policy that successive British governments have followed for years – let multi-culturalism bloom, fund religious schools, encourage official “diversity” etc etc.
Which approach has been more successful? Hard to say. I think I could make a case that London – but, please note, no other British town – is the most racially harmonious city in Europe. On the other hand, there’s no doubt that insofar as Fortuyn’s criticisms of Dutch policy make sense, they apply, mutatis mutandis, to that of the UK. And there are indeed worrying signs that in the UK the policy of “let a hundred flowers bloom” leads to troubling consequences; some of the flowers are weeds, note, eg, the rise to prominence of the Finsbury Park mosque and other locales of Islamist extremism. The French, I think, could legitimately argue that a policy of assimilation has worked reasonably well for Francophones from Africa and the departments d’outre mers in the Caribbean; I was taken to task a while ago by a Martiniquais teacher in France for writing something that implied he was not “French.” But assimilation doesn’t seem to have worked as well for the Muslim community. (Indeed, the Marseillaise was booed at a soccer match between France and Algeria a few months ago.)
Which brings us back to the question that you (and many others) have asked since Sept. 11: what are the conditions in which large numbers of Islamic immigrants to western nations can be persuaded to accept western political and social values, without being asked to disavow their religious faith? We need to find the answer. Fast.
Quite. And Fortuyn should be thanked for having the guts to ask them.
The Dish 