Lessons From Europe

By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has remained steadfast with respect to the welcoming immigration policy she has set for Germany in spite of criticism. Its implications for the rest of Europe have not gone unnoticed, especially in France. Admitting over 800,000 migrants from the Middle East and Africa this year alone seems to be the result of her personal initiative rather than agreed-upon state policy. It will create friction with German neighbors in the borderless EU.
The Merkel immigration bias may be the product of her own emotional reaction to the flood of refugees out of Syria, but it also tells you something about her confidants and staff, the culture that surrounds her at the chancellery. For, anyone with a passing familiarity with the mechanics of human migration, such as a border security official, would have counseled against it.
The real or apparent lifting of restrictions on migration will prompt successive waves of human movement that may go on for generations. Future migrants to Germany will care nothing about official attempts to cap their number, but will come anyway, joining their relatives and friends in the diasporas that the Merkel policy creates.
She has, apparently, unilaterally decided that Germany should become something different and unknown, with permanent effect. Had she put the question to the German people in a referendum, they could very well have chosen differently.
Donald Trump has found it necessary to defend his immigration and border security positions before a hostile media, though his positions meet with widespread approval by ordinary people. He could find further justification for his policy proposals in Pierre Manent’s Beyond Radical Secularism, reviewed in these pages in May of this year.
Manent addresses the situation in France in the light of the uncontrolled influx of Muslims into that country. Muslim ways of life are clearly incompatible with the French form of society. Discourse between the Muslim and the native population is made difficult, says Manent, because today Europeans hardly know how to speak about religion. He maintains that Europeans are generally quite ignorant of their history, and equally ignorant of the beliefs and rituals of the various religious bodies present within and without Europe’s borders.
Manent also speaks of the growing distance between the French and their political elites. He has elected to speak for the French people against the ruling class. New rights, he says, are granted by the ruling elites to individuals and to groups without recognition of their social consequences. Like the Germans, the French people have had little say with respect to immigration policy.
As rich as France is in material resources, says Manent, its people are politically without strength. They do not know how to gather and direct their powers because they do not know how to acknowledge the alien in their midst.
This has not escaped the attention of Muslim terrorists and expansionists. “The acts of war committed in early 2015 in Paris, Montrouge, and Vincennes can be said to have changed nothing in our country’s disposition or its deliberations and actions. These cruel events which should have profoundly transformed the moral and political landscape have only confirmed our immobility.” Manent wrote these lines before the outrages in Nice and St. Étienne du Rouvray this summer.
Manent effectively asks: “What is the best way for us Europeans to relate to those Muslims who are our fellow citizens as well as those who belong to an Islamic country? Is civic friendship possible, without which the pursuit of a common good is impossible? We do not have the leisure to wait for history to resolve the problem for us.”
Manent fears that the European political infrastructure cannot absorb the Muslims and their way of life without the eventual legal recognition of that culture and all that comes with it. Laïcité is the constitutional imperative that France remain a secular state, granting each citizen the right to follow the religion or morality of his choice.
Given its history, says Manent, French society can never be neutral. French secularity does not entail neutrality toward Christianity. In spite of laïcité, French society has retained its Christian mark, stamped mainly by Catholicism but containing significant Protestant and Jewish elements. Secularism has weakened the power of the Church’s role in the state, but has not eliminated its moral force.
By contrast, Manent points out, Islam as a human association and as a way of life is just as external to French history as Catholicism has been internal to it. He counsels that France must face up to what immediately distinguishes this group and what makes it external to French national history. Manent encourages the French to start with what is already in plain sight.
Manent observes that the progressive elites have constructed an imaginary city, the Secular Republic, which lacks the authority and means to produce a secular society. He contrasts modern France with the state of the Third Republic (1870-1940). It had authority; it represented a nation that all held sacred; it presided over tangible progress in the interest of the common good; it called all male citizens to at least two years of military service; and it laid down the content of education, putting French language and French history at its center.
In Manent’s judgment, for a government to represent national community it must have the authority to determine common goals, to focus social and political energy.
Today the function of the state seems to have been reduced to the protection of individual rights, rights which seem to be indeterminate and limitless. The French state no longer has the will to reduce immigration or the power to force the newcomer to accept citizenship while retaining his identity as a person or member of a group.
Islam is putting pressure on Europe and is advancing into Europe. It is advancing by establishing numerous Muslim populations in countries such as France. Europe is also confronted by the growing influence of the Gulf countries that possess the interest and unlimited capital to support Islamic growth.
Perhaps the most important and relevant insight provided by Manent consists in this: Islam must be understood as a meaningful whole. It is in motion; it is an actor on the world stage that must be taken seriously.
“The heterogeneity of the Muslim world, its fragmentation, its divisions and even internal wars do not detract from its community forming power.” For four centuries the West has been the expansive force in the world, and for four centuries it has laid down the laws of the world. That leadership no longer prevails. The progressive agenda has led Europe to disarm itself at its core; that is a demographic, political, military, and spiritual fact.
For all of its purported virtues, what does the progressive agenda offer a young European? A future of random violence and a loss of identity, the suppression of free speech, and an exquisite, ever-changing set of rules meant to confine individual self-expression and critical thought. The progressive objective is to silence an individual’s ability to express his commonsense apprehension of what is happening around him. Whether the French people will be able to throw off the utopian fancies that are now in the service of their political elites remains to be seen.