Idealism Without Illusion

There is a contradiction at the heart of the NATO strategy in Afghanistan: calendar vs. conditions. Jennifer Rubin has put the matter bluntly: “You can’t promise to be both attuned to facts on the ground and begin bugging out.” Well, former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband tried to do just that last week in a speech at MIT and an op-ed in the New York Times.

I spent last week in Israel and the West Bank talking to actors from both sides of the conflict. On the final day I visited the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) at Tel Aviv University for a round table. As a friend of Israel and a supporter of a negotiated two-state solution, I was in a gloomy mood and I tried to explain why:

Israel is about to deploy the Iron Dome [a missile shield]. The Palestinians are about to deploy another flotilla. Each seems to symbolize something important. The Dome is defensive, reactive, militarised, high-tech, and most likely ruinously expensive. The flotilla is dynamic, offensive, civil, politicised, cheap, and media-friendly. It leverages global network power. The Israeli “Dome-approach” is tactical and local while the Palestinians’ “Flotilla-approach” is strategic and global.

Underlining a new mood spreading across Europe, the German Parliament passed a law on March 3rd to make forced marriage a criminal offence carrying a five year prison sentence. The law also granted to non-German citizens who have been taken abroad against their will a legal right to return to Germany.

This is an example of a European government doing its job — creating and policing the non-negotiable framework within which other actors can get on with religious reform and cultural innovation and establish what the academic Bassam Tibi calls a “civil Islam” capable of accommodating cultural modernity.

Shock waves went through French politics last week when a poll in Le Parisien put the far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen on 23 percent of the vote, ahead of President Sarkozy and the Socialist Party’s Martine Aubry, who each have 21 percent.

What’s wrong with France? Part of the answer is surely the inexorable rise of morosité.

Morosité is one of those gloriously capacious French words. It means a collective and quite spectacular sullenness and gloominess about a world that has irrevocably lost its lustre. Morosité can turn to inchoate anger and it is on the rise all over Europe. Marine Le Pen hopes to ride it to power.

“Ideas,” wrote the German sociologist Max Weber, have often, “like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.” In the governments of Europe, the idea of “Islamophobia” is the “track” along which much thinking about extremism runs.

In 1997 the Runnymede Trust set up the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, chaired by Professor Gordon Conway, the vice-chancellor of the University of Sussex. Its highly influential report, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, launched by Home Secretary Jack Straw, established a new orthodoxy: that “Islamophobia,” defined as a “dread or hatred of Islam and therefore ... the fear and dislike of all Muslims,” was widespread.

Yet today, many commentators agree with the French writer Pascal Bruckner that “Islamophobia” is a word we Europeans should “delete from our vocabulary.” What explains this turnaround?

On February 5th, in a major speech in Munich, British Prime Minister David Cameron called time on state multiculturalism:

A passively tolerant society says to its citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will just leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more. It believes in certain values and actively promotes them. Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality. It says to its citizens: this is what defines us as a society. To belong here is to believe in these things.

To belong is to believe. This idea contradicts the complacent Euro-orthodoxy summed up by the mayor of Gothenburg, Göran Johansson, in 2005: “I don’t care if you respect our culture. You just have to obey the law.”