Book Review

Immigrants to a land of emigrants

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: can Europe be the same with different people in it?

I know a thing or two about immigrants and asylum seekers, having lived in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. There, as the country broke up, a regular emigration "fever" broke out. Suddenly, almost everyone I knew was packing, irrespective of whether or not they had been directly affected by the war. They just wanted out. When I went back to Belgrade 10 years later, not one of my dozen or so old friends was still there. All had flown the coop.

Such East European migrants, often skilled and seeking work rather then benefits, do not preoccupy Christopher Caldwell nearly as much as Muslim North Africans and Asians in his gloom-laden account. There is naught for our comfort here, as Caldwell holds each of the supposed benefits of the phenomenon of mass migration up to the light only to pronounce them false, exaggerated or transitory.

His broad thesis is that the several hundred million people living north of the Mediterranean are an ageing community, doomed to shrink rapidly in size once the immediate post-war generation dies off. Several hundred million people live to their south in an opposite condition. Young and growing in numbers, the desire of a great many of them to move north is "unslakeable". But as they continue to migrate, and as the host community ages, shrinks and abandons urban centres, the pressure on the new arrivals to adapt and integrate declines correspondingly, resulting in the creation of large, increasingly self-referential ghettoes.

As examples of where we're all apparently heading, Caldwell points to the notorious banlieues of Paris and Strasbourg, with their uncontrollable car-burning youths, as well as to some of the large housing estates ringing cities in the Low Countries and Sweden. Europe, Caldwell maintains, is now essentially frightened of its own immigrants, partly because the Islamic fervour of many of them failed wholly to mutate or fade away in the expected fashion, creating a crisis for a secular culture that was established from a post-Christian perspective.

Opinion-formers and governments mask this feeling of unease by explaining away immigration as something their societies need, or by pointing to the example of the United States as a society that has unarguably profited from it. But Caldwell is not impressed. He insists that for various cultural reasons it has proved far easier for America to integrate Catholic Latin Americans than it will be for Europe to do the same with its Muslim incomers from Asia or the Maghrib. And he dislikes the way the justifications for immigration keep shifting: "Now growth, now welfare; now the benefit to the host society. Immigration is a fait accompli for which people are scrambling to find a rationale."

Whether Caldwell will persuade, or just annoy, readers with his worrying prognosis of future conflict will depend, I suspect, on their existing ideological sympathies, and on whether such buzzwords as multiculturalism and diversity evoke enthusiasm or scepticism among them. Some will demur at his tendency to write off the Islamic world as culturally bankrupt, others at his tendency to place all Muslims together in an undifferentiated lump. Yet, as I've seen from my own experience of life in east London, the differences between Kurdish and Asian Muslims, not to mention Albanians, remain pretty vast and visible.

The author answers his own question himself, suggesting that a homogenised and hard-line brand of Islam is rapidly imposing itself on the immigrant Muslim communities of Europe, partly via television and the internet. If so, that presumably means the radical Muslims of Pakistani descent in the north-west of England, the violent tearaways of the Paris banlieues and alienated Moroccans of Rotterdam and Brussels are merging into one. Well, we shall find out.

Andrew Hammond's anthology of Balkan travel writing, Through Another Europe, meanwhile, serves as a reminder that the peoples of Ottoman-ruled Europe were also once seen as utterly alien, even if they were not seen as a threat.  

Nineteenth-century travellers took an almost ghoulish enthusiasm in describing these lands as hopelessly backward, violent and barbaric - when they weren't focusing on the picturesque aspect of markets, harems and steam baths. As the editor notes, the mocking, patronising tone changed abruptly after the Second World War, when Communism stripped these lands of their supposed comic quaintness. However, the same disparaging tone revived, after a fashion, in the 1990s, when ethnic warfare in Yugoslavia, chaos in Albania and exposure of the horrors of Romanian orphanages made talk of Balkan peoples as barbarian "tribes" briefly fashionable again.

Many of the writers cited are, perhaps inevitably, somewhat repetitive and unimaginative, especially the Victorians, with their tedious obsession with ruins, costumes and table manners. But I was happy to come across some real gems that I had not encountered before, as well as snippets from such well-known writers on the region as Rebecca West, Fitzroy Maclean, Edith Durham and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Two are Simon Winchester's account of meeting the dervishes of Macedonia, and R.H. Bruce Lockhart's sparkling description of an encounter with the long-nosed and very civilised King Boris of Bulgaria.

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