Another specter is haunting Europe today – the specter of Islamism. This ideology –- represented by the Muslim Brotherhood and other extreme and violent groups like the Islamic State, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda – seeks to advance Islam’s influence over politics and is related to but not identical to its cousin political Islam. It has grown and spread across the continent so much in recent decades that it increasingly and negatively also affects US interests.
US policymakers have generally not paid close attention to the Islamism phenomenon. All administrations have worked well with European governments to combat terrorism and “counter violent extremism,” particularly since 9/11. US embassies and consulates have engaged extensively with Muslim groups. The prevailing view in Washington, however, has been that Islamism is a concern but is primarily a European problem. This assessment is not wrong, but the trends have negative implications for US national security. European leaders need to combat Islamism more rigorously and US policymakers should also not treat it only as “Europe’s problem.”
Islamism in Action
In the last 20 years, both violent and non-violent forms of Islamism have increased dramatically in Europe. France alone has witnessed more terrorism than elsewhere on the continent -- some 30 incidents in the last 10 years alone, such as the dramatic attacks on the Bataclan theater in Paris and the offices of the Charlie Hebdo publisher in Paris in 2015 and the beheading of French school teacher Samuel Paty in 2020, as well as in Nice and Marseilles. Other attacks have taken place in Brussels, Vienna, Berlin, London, Manchester, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Turku, Frankfurt, and Kongsberg, leaving hundreds of innocent people dead, injured, or scarred for life. Still others were prevented by good intelligence and police work. All had an Islamist dimension.
Of the estimated 5000 persons who traveled to Syria from Europe to join ISIS in the 2010s, more than 2000 were from France and radical ideology has inspired many to commit violent acts at home. Knife attacks have become an everyday phenomenon, with particularly egregious cases in Algeciras, Duisburg, Mannheim increasing by nearly 40 percent from 2021 to 2023, to 14,000 in Germany alone. The police chief in the Germany city of Solingen responded to the recent murder of three civilians by an IS supporter by saying “everyone has to decide for themselves whether to go to festivities, to football matches, or are on public transport,” essentially giving Islamists a vote on life in the city. In 2019, some 3,000 churches, schools and other Christian landmarks were vandalized, looted, or defaced, according to one estimate -- most in France (on average about three/day and Germany (two/day), but also in Belgium, the UK, Denmark, Ireland, Italy and Spain. Not all of these cases had a proven Islamist aspect, but a very large percentage did.
Non-violent expressions of Islamism are also common. Banned symbols of terrorist organizations (IS, Hamas, Hezbollah) appear regularly in public. Street prayers are common, with annual Eid events in Birmingham, for example, growing to some 140,000 participants. In France, these prayers continue even after the government banned them in 2011. Islamist inspired clashes between fans at some soccer games reflect radicalization trends.
These manifestations have increased in number since October 7, 2023 and include widespread protests against Israel and ugly expressions of anti-Semitism. Pro-Gaza demonstrations with strong pro-Hamas undercurrents are commonplace. In May, demonstrators in Hamburg called for the caliphate as the “final solution” for all Muslim struggles. During riots in the UK this summer, thousands of Muslims marched through London chanting, “Jews, remember Khaybar. The Army of Muhammed is coming to kill you, too.” Many Jews feel the need to hide their identity lest they be attacked on the street, and emigration from France and the UK to Israel has reached new highs. Hamburg canceled a Jewish Street Festival in August over fears it would be attacked by Islamists.
Mass migration, including from predominantly Muslim states, has become increasingly intertwined with manifestations of Islamism. What Germans call “parallel societies” have formed across the continent. While observers on the Left attribute these enclaves to failed government policy, racism, and Islamophobia, in fact a wide network of Islamists with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir, and Jamaat-i-Islami has explicitly urged Muslims to separate from and resist host country Judeo-Christian culture. The most visible cases are in the banlieues in France, where Islamists restrict contact between Muslims and others and encourage extremism. Sorbonne Professor Bernard Rougier describes these areas where hatred of democracy, the West, Jews, and other groups flourishes, arguing that the environment created by fréro-salafistes has been more important than “marginalization” and unemployment in radicalizing youth as it provides a conducive ecosystem that aids in recruiting jihadis and advances other Islamist goals.
Islamists have inspired the formation of what some call “no-go” areas in many European cities, a term former German Chancellor Merkel and others have used but some allege does not exist. The number of Islamists in Germany was estimated at more than 27,000 in 2022, according to the German federal domestic intelligence agency BfV, much larger than 20 years ago. Indeed, the BfV coined a phrase “TikTokisation of Islamism” to describe the comprehensive network of Islamist channels and videos on social media. These manifestations of Islamism take place in more dispersed areas, while in the past they tended to be concentrated in large cities.
Failed Efforts to Stem the Growth of Islamism
In the decade following 9/11, European governments focused on engaging Muslim communities, building contacts and searching for moderate partners. Governments focused primarily on dialogue, building mutual understanding, and seeking to ensure that Muslims embraced democracy, practiced a moderate form of Islam, and integrated into society, which they defined as multicultural. These efforts were well-meaning but the Left also embedded narratives of “structural Islamophobia” and “hate speech” codes into political discourse and behavior, causing politicians to be exceptionally careful in how they dealt with these issues, lest they be accused of being “anti-Islam.” Thus, they usually stressed that Islam was an integral part of European society and there was little to worry about.
The UK, which had struggled to develop a response to Islamism since the burning of a Salman Rushdie book in 1988, in 2003 announced its “CONTEST” strategy with four pillars: Prevent, Pursue, Protect and Prepare. The EU in 2004 published its first Handbook on Integration and in 2005 adopted a Common Agenda for Integration. In 2005, the EU adopted a counterterrorism strategy “Prevent, Protect, Pursue and Respond,” which became the framework for EU member states and EU FMs highlighted the EU’s commitment to engage with Islam, which they considered a key element in the “Alliance of Civilizations.” In 2006, Germany launched the National Conference on Islam, and in 2007 a National Integration Plan that promoted German values. In 2007, the EU launched a Special Fund for the Integration of Third-Country Nationals and in 2009 a European Integration Forum. The German Foreign Ministry set up a unit to pursue dialogue with Islamist groups and named an envoy for the “Dialogue of Civilizations.”
EU and NATO member states also tried to address grievances with financial support and training programs, as did French President Jacques Chirac after the riots of 2005, when he asked imams to restore calm with pledges of increased spending. In July 2010, the German Interior Ministry launched a program to help violent radicals turn their backs on extremism. In 2015, EU HR/VP Federica Mogherini dismissed the idea of a clash between Islam and the West, arguing Islam belongs in Europe. She said she was "not afraid to say that political Islam should be part of the picture.” The general political response was a certain pandering to Islamist priorities, denial of the problem, and rationalization of violence.
Meanwhile, European domestic intelligence agencies have had an excellent understanding of the problem. The German BfV went on record as early as 2005 to say that Islamist groups represented a threat to German society. More than a decade later, the internal service in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, wrote in a 2018 report that “in the long run, the threat posed by legalistic Islamism to the liberal democratic system is greater than that of jihadism … They aspire to an Islamist order but are prepared to allow certain democratic elements within that framework. For this reason, their extremism is often barely recognizable at first glance.” Virtually all European services monitor and have a highly negative view of the Muslim Brotherhood.
UK PM David Cameron was one of the first leaders to challenge this approach when in 2011 he warned Europe to “wake up to what is happening” and to “get to the root of the problem.” Nicholas Sarkozy, Jose Aznar, and Angela Merkel admitted multiculturalism was failing. In 2014, former UK PM Tony Blair argued that tackling “a radicalized and politicized view of Islam” should be at the top of the political agenda. Authors like former Berlin Finance Minister (SPD) Thilo Sarrazin had raised the problem many years earlier -- and were defended from widespread criticism by such politicians as former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt – but governments largely viewed them as too hot to handle or worse, even as their books were bestsellers.
Meanwhile, governments continued to focus primarily on jihadism and stressed tolerance and multiculturalism – perhaps summarized best by Merkel’s “wir schaffen das” (“we can do it”) comment – after hundreds of thousands of migrants, many from predominantly Muslim countries, in 2015 brought values that clashed with European traditions like women’s rights, free speech, democracy, and identification with and loyalty to the state. Large-scale Muslim migration to the EU imports anti-Semitism and anti-Israel views. EU politicians criticized Poland for seeking to protect its borders after Russia and Belarus weaponized migrants, many from Muslim countries, to enter the EU illegally. The EU boosted its Frontex border forces but has not reformed generous asylum laws. These inadequate responses contributed to the growth of anti-immigrant parties in every NATO and EU member state and put border security high on the EU agenda. Of the many reasons for the Tory loss in the July UK elections and the summer riots, one was anger among ordinary citizens at the failure of successive governments to heed their concerns about Islamism.
Corrective Measures?
By 2019, manifestations of Islamism had grown and spread to such an extent European politicians began to acknowledge publicly that their policies were not successful. French President Macron stood out when he referred to Islamism as a “political project that seeks to secede from the republic.” He continued this theme in 2020, stressing in speeches that Islamism is “incompatible with the indivisibility of the Republic and the necessary unity of the nation.” He announced reforms to the representational and supervisory structures of Islam and an inquiry into pro-Islamist bias in academia. He pledged to replace “detached imams” sent from abroad with clerics trained in France and more scrutiny over the funding of mosques. In 2020, Austria set up a Documentation Center for Political Islam as part of its national strategy of deradicalization and preventing extremism.
Austria, Denmark, and France have banned foreign funding of Muslim organizations while Germany trains imams domestically, Italy deports radical ones, and Sweden has reduced public funding to groups connected to Islamist networks. Denmark and Italy have not experienced Islamism as visibly as other EU member states, although Muslim leaders there have declared the goal of introducing sharia when the local Muslim population reaches a certain level. In Sweden, DPM Ebba Busch recently said Islam needs to adapt to Swedish values, that Muslims who do not integrate should leave the country, and that honor killings, clan structures, beheadings, the stoning of women, and Sharia law do not belong in the country.
Most policy changes, however, have not been comprehensive and face strong domestic resistance. Politicians’ unwillingness to confront Islamism has many sources, not the least that many Islamist activities remain legal under national laws and countries have adopted speech codes that label those who discuss the problem candidly or propose alternatives to failed policies as “racists,” “Islamophobes,” or “playing into the hands of the far right.” Indeed, no NATO or EU member state has adopted a coherent approach. There is no central EU document that advises how governments should deal with Islamist organizations. This leads to major differences in policies from country to country as well as within countries. The recent success of Rassemblement National (RN) in France demonstrates that Macron barely moved the needle. Far-right parties have been succeeding across Europe in part as a result of their hardline approach to Islamism. The success of the far-right AfD in eastern Germany in the September elections was in part a result of voters’ anxiety about the growth of Islam and Islamism.
Negative Implications for the United States
Why does this matter to the United States? The naïve, modest, and contradictory approaches that leaders of most NATO and EU member states have pursued to the growth and spread of Islamism undermine their reliability as allies in confronting the many challenges facing the Global West. This reduces US security and complicates US foreign policy and other objectives.
Islamism in Europe has become closely linked to mass migration, which has exacerbated societal tensions and weakened allies from within. NATO and EU member states remain not only targets of terrorism – as the cancellation of Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna recently demonstrated – but also breeding grounds, bases of operation, and launchpads for global Islamist networks. Moreover, there are few indications that European leaders are fundamentally changing their prevailing approach to the challenge of Islamism. The August knifings by an Islamist in Solingen provoked outrage and much soul searching across the German political spectrum but real change is likely to be difficult. Tougher knife laws and expulsions from the country, as senior officials are proposing, are not enough.
Islamism has altered political dynamics across the continent. Every NATO and EU member state now has at least one party with a strong focus on migration, Islam, and Islamism, which in almost a dozen countries is either among the most popular, can influence policy, decide governing coalitions, holds power or is a candidate for power. While their focus on this nexus of issues is positive, most pursue other policies that are very negative for the transatlantic relationship. Many are accommodationist or pro-Putin, minimally supportive of or anti-NATO, contain strong undercurrents of anti-Americanism, and/or oppose key US foreign policy priorities. This camp includes the German AfD (second most popular party, which includes supporters of its forerunner PEGIDA - Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident), France (RN), Austria (FPOe), the Netherlands (PVV), Slovakia (Smer and its coalition partners), Hungary (Fidesz), Bulgaria (Vazrazhdane, Velichiye), Belgium (Vlaams Belang), Poland (Konfederacja), and the Czech Republic (SPD). Anti-Islamist parties in other EU member states (e.g. Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Romania) are more favorably disposed towards NATO and US policies.
Rising Islamism also increases differences with Europe over Iran and Israel policy, as governments prioritize domestic peace and winning elections. It has contributed to softer Iran policies, enabling Tehran to expand its malign influence across the Middle East, as well as surges in antisemitism and hostile environments for Jews. Islamist networks based in Europe and elsewhere fan the flames of antisemitism, weaponizing it against allies and partners, and weakening US interests and positions. After Labor benefitted from Islamist voters in the July UK elections, PM Keir Starmer began looking to drop longstanding policy and recognize Palestine. His government is unlikely to confront visible and growing manifestations of Islamism. Macron may have to accommodate the Left on French Middle East policy, given its very strong electoral showing this summer, even if he has appointed a conservative PM.
These developments are also threats to US national security. While the United States rightly prioritizes combating terrorism in its engagement with Europe, an increased focus on Islamism is also needed. It is not for the United States to get involved in Europe’s Islamism problem. The landscape varies significantly between countries that have been relatively effective (Denmark) and those that have not (France, Belgium, Germany). However, European politicians are not winning the struggle with Islamism. EU/NATO member states need much more robust responses to the problem.
The United States has not experienced violent manifestations of Islamism as Europe has, in part because of historic success in integrating migrants from very different cultures and traditions, but Islamism is present here as well and the phenomenon could worsen. There are lessons for the United States in failed European approaches and more can be done to remind European governments of their negative impact on US interests.
A former career Senior Foreign Service Officer, Matt Boyse was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State responsible for Central Europe 2018-2021. He is now a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute and an Adjunct at the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies, The George Washington, and American universities.
