Large scale immigration has led to important changes in political discourse across much of Europe. The lack of successful integration policies has put pressure on government services, thereby weakening social cohesion and, unsurprisingly, producing a vocal and sometimes violent backlash. The anti-immigrant Rassemblement National received the most votes in the recent snap election in France, while the even more radically nativist Alternative für Deutschland did well in the June European elections and is positioned to do equally well or better in regional elections in Eastern Germany in September. Since these parties also tend to be critical of the traditional Atlantic alliance, the potential political shifts fueled by anti-immigration sentiment are directly relevant to American national interest. If these parties eventually enter governing coalitions–not imminent, but not unimaginable–traditional Atlanticist commitments will be called into question. U.S. policy makers should be paying attention.
There is a second piece to the puzzle. In contemporary European discourse, the challenges of immigration are inextricably tied to questions of Islam and Islamism. Of course not all immigrants come from Muslim majority countries–many more are Christians from Ukraine. Nor are all Muslim immigrants Islamists, i.e. advocates of radical political views shaped by particular strains of Islam. Nonetheless, the dissemination of Islamism in Europe overlaps significantly with immigration patterns. The responses to both issues–immigration and Islamism– connect them to each other, so that immigrants are wrongly assumed to hail primarily from the Muslim Middle East, and Muslims are, equally wrongly, assumed all to be Islamist. With these caveats in mind, it is important to recognize how Europe has not succeeded in integrating the Middle Eastern immigrant population, elements of which cling to Islamist viewpoints incompatible with liberal Western societies.
The specific character of the combination of the two–Islamism and immigration–varies from country to country. Some countries in Central Europe, like Hungary, have adamantly refused to accept Muslim immigrant communities, while Poland, the Baltics and Finland face weaponized immigration from Belarus and Russia. Countries in the European South, like Italy, are in the front-lines of cross-Mediterranean human trafficking so that immigration has shifted politics to the right and induced tensions with the European Union. The United Kingdom opted for Brexit in part to reduce immigration, but successive governments have failed to do so: anti-immigrant civil unrest, evidenced in this summer’s riots, has ensued.
Germany is a particularly instructive case in point. It is the dominant political force in the European Union with the largest economy. It is also the country with, in absolute terms, the largest foreign-born population, as it has long been an attractive destination for immigrants, whether from other EU countries or from outside the EU. Today about one in five residents was born outside Germany, and of those born outside the EU, most come from Muslim majority countries, especially Turkey and Syria. Many Muslim immigrants integrate successfully–some even pursue prominent political careers–but many others bring with them cultural inclinations that make integration difficult. This cultural baggage from their home countries includes generalized grievances against “the West,” emphatically patriarchal expectations hostile to gender equality, and an uncompromising animosity toward Israel indistinguishable from antisemitism.
Unlike England and France, Germany does not have a history as a colonial power in the Middle East. One might therefore expect an easier path toward integration. Yet post-war Germany also has a history of facing up to its Nazi past, accepting responsibility for the Holocaust, and therefore articulating consistent support for Israel. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel phrased this commitment famously by insisting that Israeli security is part of Germany’s “raison d’état.” In addition, much of the German public remains acutely concerned about expressions of antisemitism. There are exceptions, to be sure, especially in the academic and cultural sector where antisemitism has become embarrassingly pronounced: more education is no guarantor against bigotry, as the United States witnessed at our own elite universities during the past year. However German public opinion in general still rejects the outbursts of antisemitism that have multiplied in the wake of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. Unfortunately, that same revulsion against antisemitism does not hold for the Islamist faction among immigrants into Germany.
The post-war efforts to “come to terms with the Nazi past” and to reject the legacy of antisemitism represent one of the main features of modern Germany’s path toward liberal democracy. Yet precisely this German refusal of antisemitism has become a point of conflict with Muslim immigration and assimilation. Many immigrants arrive from countries where antisemitic attitudes are widespread, and these attitudes have fueled some of the anti-Israel protests in Germany. One consequence is a dramatic spike in insecurity in Germany’s Jewish population who have faced physical assaults, as synagogues operate only under armed police protection. A further consequence is a more general sharpening of debates around immigration and the rule of law, moving the Overton window toward the political right. This transformation of the political landscape may ultimately have an impact on US-German bilateral relations and transatlantic cooperation more broadly.
Immigration into Germany is hardly new. There is a long history of immigration, including the arrival of the Protestant Huguenots from seventeenth-century France who found a degree of religious tolerance in Prussia; the many Russians who fled the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to settle in Berlin; and the waves of foreign workers, starting in the 1950s who built the “Wirtschaftswunder,” the economic miracle, through which West Germany recovered after the devastation of the Second World War. Assimilation was not always seamless, but immigrants often ultimately succeeded in integrating, as they viewed their arrival in Germany as a gateway to opportunity.
However, for the large-scale immigration, especially from the Middle East, of the early twenty-first century, different attitudes and circumstances have made integration more difficult to achieve. Among the immigrants, various strands of neo-traditionalism in the Muslim communities have contributed to a preference for separatism and the development of “parallel societies,” hostile to modern social norms. The expectation to identity with and enter into German mainstream culture, a Leitkultur, has come to be denounced as an illegitimate imposition. In other words, cultural assimilation is no longer necessarily regarded as an unquestionable desideratum or an opportunity for improvement. On the contrary, in April Islamist demonstrators in Hamburg, for example, called for replacing Germany’s liberal democracy with a “caliphate.” Meanwhile, with regard to the receiving society, German cultural self-understanding –as in much of the West–has grown less self-confident. It is now shaped more by the fragmentation of multiculturalism rather than by a cohesive German national identity. If a host country is unsure of itself, immigrants may become less eager to integrate themselves into it. More abstractly: contemporary post-modern societies have become entropic and decentered, with the result that assimilation becomes elusive.
As a result of failed integration policies, immigrant-majority neighborhoods develop, such as Neukölln in Berlin, once a German working-class area, now largely a Muslim ghetto. Failed integration also contributes to a widespread perception of greater criminality. The same debate is playing out across the continent: allegations of higher crime rates among immigrants circulate, in turn eliciting quick denunciations that these insinuations are only expressions of prejudice or racism. A secondary debate then follows about the methodology of crime statistics and, in particular, whether the citizenship status or race of suspected criminals should even be reported. Progressives argue that such reporting runs the risk of stigmatizing whole groups, while others counter that concealing the suspect’s identity feeds conspiracy theories and the populist allegation that the press and the government are hiding “the truth.” The controversy is playing out now in Berlin in a symptomatic way. The General Secretary of the Liberal Party, Bijan Djir-Sarai, has called for transparency regarding the nationality of criminal suspects, while the head of the Social Democratic Party’s committee on Migration and Diversity, Aziz Bozkurt, denounces that proposal as “right-wing populism.” Interestingly the advocates on both sides of the debate have immigrant backgrounds. Djir-Sarai was born in 1976 in Tehran to an Iranian-Jewish family, while Bozkurt was born in 1981 in Germany to an Alawite family from Turkey.
The controversy over reporting the nationality of suspects, which was also the spark that ignited the recent wave of riots in the U.K., is however just one piece of a larger social anxiety about the erosion of the rule of law. The law governing the evaluation of applications for refugee status, for example, has proven to be a Potemkin village. Individuals whose applications are denied are generally not deported and instead remain in Germany indefinitely in a legal limbo, despite Chancellor Scholz’s declaration that “grand scale” deportations are necessary. The net effect is an erosion of public trust in the administration of immigration. In addition, regular reports of terrorist plots linked to ISIS–such as the plan for a suicide bombing at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna– further unsettle the public. Doubts about the rule of law are spreading–whether with regard to crime statistics, immigration management, or terrorism. Hence the proliferation of calls for more law and order. In July the Islamic Center in Hamburg was shut down: Interior Minister Nancy Faeser accused it of promoting extremism, supporting Hezbollah and serving as a front for Iran.
Why should this matter to the United States? In this era of Great Power Competition, the countries of Europe count as some of America’s most important allies. Political and social instability there should be of concern, if only because of the threat they pose to weaken the alliance. In addition, to the extent that failed integration produces breeding grounds for extremism, it should not be forgotten that the 9/11 plot was prepared significantly among radicals in Germany. Islamism in Europe can turn into a terrorist threat to the American homeland. Finally, the backlash against immigration, especially in Germany and France, has been carried by political parties whose animosity to immigrants goes hand in hand with a rejection of the transatlantic alliance of Western democracies. The crises of immigration and Islamism in Europe are therefore directly pertinent to American national interests. An astute U.S. foreign policy would help manage these challenges.
“Here and in all Caravan pieces the views expressed belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World.”
