and globalized market. But many of those who no longer figured on unemployment rolls—women and young people especially—were now doing low-paid, part-time work without benefits; or else were employed on fixed- term contracts in job programmes subsidized or under-written by the state.
Those whose wages were too low to support them and their families could still turn to the welfare state, and many did. In the UK, where the Thatcherite assault on state and society alike had been felt most acutely, 14 million people now lived in poverty, including 4 million children.[377] One person in six depended upon Income Support or Family Credit programmes to keep them above the poverty line. Homelessness, which in northern Europe at least had been effectively eradicated by the end of the 1950s, was once again on the increase: in the course of the Thatcher years the number of homeless in London alone rose ten-fold. By the mid-’90s it had reached 80,000. Within a few miles of some of the most expensive real estate in the world parts of the British capital were beginning to resemble the ‘Outcast London’ of late-Victorian notoriety.[378]
Whereas, in the past, economic upswings had tended to lift many of the poor into better paid and more secure employment, this was no longer happening. Europe, in other words, was developing an under-class in the midst of plenty. As the French sociologist Andre Gorz had predicted back in the 1960s, the end of the industrial era would see the birth of a new caste of casual, temporary workers—a ‘non-class of non-workers’—at once marginal to modern life and yet somehow right at its heart.[379]
Like its American equivalent, the European under-class was determined not only by poverty and unemployment (or under-employment) but also and increasingly by race: in the mid-’90s the unemployment rate in London for young
Europe’s major cities, London above all, were now truly cosmopolitan. If the high-paying city jobs were still going to white Europeans (and North Americans) nearly all the low-paying work, from street-cleaning to child-care, was now done not by traditional ‘second-class’ Europeans from the
Immigration, though perennially discouraged and rigorously controlled throughout Western Europe, was thus still a major demographic factor: of those same inner-London children of 1998, one third did not use English as their first language. These were frequently the offspring of refugees, ‘asylum-seekers’ in the jargon of the day, whose numbers had ballooned in the wake of the Yugoslav wars; but also of migrant workers from Central and South-East Asia, the Middle East and much of Africa—many of them illegal and thus undocumented.
In Germany, whose asylum facilities were (and remain) by far the most generous in Europe[380] but where it was traditionally very difficult for immigrants to obtain full citizenship, it was estimated that there were five million such people—counting families and dependants—by the end of the century. The majority of asylum applications to Germany by the beginning of the new century came from Iraq, Turkey and the countries of former Yugoslavia, but there were also growing numbers from Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and Vietnam.
The fear that Western Europe might be ‘overrun’ by ‘economic refugees’, illegal immigrants, asylum- seekers and the like contributed to a widespread lack of enthusiasm for EU enlargement. Already by the 1980s undocumented workers from Poland were present in large numbers in the British and German building trades. But the problem was not so much Poland, or Hungary, or the other would-be accession states of Central Europe, but rather the lands to their east. In 1992 Poland itself had 290,000 ‘irregular’ immigrants, mostly from Bulgaria, Romania and the former USSR; Hungary, with a population of just 10 million, was home to over 100,000 asylum- seekers. Whereas life there—or in Slovakia or the Czech Republic—was hard, it was not intolerable and the gap separating these countries from their Western neighbours was already being bridged, however slowly. The gulf between Central Europe and the rest of post-Communist Europe, however, yawned far greater.
Thus whereas by the late-Nineties the average monthly wage in Poland and the Czech Republic was already approaching $400, in Belarus, Ukraine and Romania it hovered around $80; in Bulgaria at under $70; and in Moldova at just $30—itself a misleading average, since outside of the capital, Chisinau, incomes were lower still, in a population of whom 48 percent still worked on the land. And unlike Poland, or even Bulgaria, the condition of the former Soviet republics was not improving: by the year 2000, one Moldovan in two was earning less than $220 a year—just $19 a month.
In such circumstances the only hope for Moldovans—or Ukrainians, or indeed many Russians outside of the major conurbations—was to find work in the West. And so an alarming number of them—young women above all—ended up in the hands of criminal syndicates, shipped into the EU through Romania and the Balkans to be employed at best as indentured servants in workshops and restaurants, at worst and more often as prostitutes: in Germany or Italy—or even Bosnia, servicing a well-paid clientele of Western soldiers, administrators and ‘aid- workers’. Involuntary Moldovan and Ukrainian ‘guest-workers’ thus joined the Roma (Gypsies) at the bottom of the continent’s multi-cultural heap.[381]
The victims of the sex trade were largely invisible—like earlier generations of white migrants from Europe’s fringes they blended easily enough into the local majority, which is why they proved so hard for police and social services to trace. But most of the people whom French sociologists and critics had taken to describing as
All too often this under-class was distinguished not just by colour but by creed. For in addition to being multi-cultural the European Union was now increasingly multi-religious. Christians remained in the overwhelming majority, albeit non-practicing in most cases. Jews were now a small minority, their numbers significant only in Russia, France and to a much lesser extent the UK and Hungary. But Hindus and above all Muslims were now a substantial and visible presence in the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, as well as in the main cities of Scandinavia, Italy and Central Europe. And—uniquely among the major world religions in Europe—the number of adherents to Islam was rising rapidly.
By the first years of the twenty-first century there were perhaps six million Muslims in France (the majority of North African extraction) and almost as many in Germany (chiefly of Turkish or Kurdish background). Together with the nearly two million Muslims in the UK (mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh) and a significant presence in the Benelux countries and Italy, these figures suggested a total of perhaps fifteen million Muslims in the Union as a whole.
The Muslim presence in communities that were hitherto overwhelmingly secularposed difficult questions of social policy: what provision should be made for the wearing of religious clothing or symbols in public schools? How far should the state encourage (or discourage) separate cultural institutions and facilities? Was it good policy to support multi-cultural (and thus effectively separate) communities or should the authorities seek rather to facilitate and even enforce integration? Official policy in France advocated cultural integration and forbade the display of signs of faith in school; elsewhere, notably in Britain and the Netherlands, there was a broader tolerance for cultural distinction and assertive religious self-identification. But opinion everywhere was divided (see Chapter 23).
If such questions had risen rapidly to the top of national political agendas, and were increasingly entangled in debates over immigration and asylum, it was because of growing anxiety all across the continent at the rise of a new generation of xenophobic parties. Some of these parties had roots in an earlier age of sectarian or nationalist politics; others—like the surprisingly successful Dansk Folkeparti or the List Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands—were
