Postwar

strenuous efforts to integrate and assimilate, young men and women in Antwerp or Marseille or Leicester now vociferously identified both with the land of their birth—Belgium or France or Britain— and with the religion and region of their family’s roots. Girls, especially, took to wearing traditional clothing and religious symbols—sometimes under family pressure, but often in rebellion against the compromises of an older generation.

The reaction of the public authorities, as we have seen, varied somewhat by local tradition and circumstance: only the French National Assembly, in a righteous fit of secular republicanism, opted by a vote of 494-36 to ban the wearing of all religious symbols in state schools. But this move, undertaken in February 2004 and targeted at the voile—the headgear of observant Muslim girls—must be understood in a broader and more troubling context. Racial prejudice in many places was being turned to political advantage by the far Right; and anti-Semitism was on the rise in Europe, for the first time in over forty years.

Seen from across the Atlantic, where it became a staple in the speeches of Europhobic politicians and neo-conservative pundits, anti-Semitism in France or Belgium or Germany was immediately identified as a return to the continent’s dark past. Writing in the Washington Post in May 2002, the influential columnist George Will went so far as to describe the recrudescence of anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe as ‘the second—and final?—phase of the struggle for a “final solution to the Jewish question”.’ The American Ambassador to the EU, Rockwell Schnabel, told a special gathering in Brussels of the American Jewish Committee that anti- Semitism in Europe ‘is getting to a point where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s’.

This was inflammatory rhetoric, and deeply misguided. Anti-Jewish feelings were largely unknown in contemporary Europe—except among Muslims and especially Europeans of Arab descent, where they were a direct outcome of the festering crisis in the Middle East. Arab television stations, now available via satellite throughout Europe, regularly broadcast reports from Gaza and the Occupied West Bank. Infuriated by what they saw and heard, and encouraged by Arab and Israeli authorities alike to identify Israel with their local Jewish neighbours, young men (mostly) in the suburbs of Paris or Lyon or Strasbourg turned on their Jewish neighbours: they scrawled graffiti on Jewish community buildings, desecrated cemeteries, bombed schools and synagogues and in a few instances attacked Jewish teenagers or families.

The attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions—concentrated in the first years of the new century—aroused concern not because of their scale, or even on account of their racist character, but because of their implicitly inter-communal nature. This was not the old European anti-Semitism: for those seeking scapegoats for their discontents, Jews were no longer the target of choice. Indeed, they ranked well down the pecking order. A French poll in January 2004 found that whereas 10 percent of those questioned admitted to disliking Jews, a far higher number—23 percent—disliked ‘North Africans’. Racially motivated attacks on Arabs—or, varying by country, on Turks, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Senegalese and other visible minorities—were far more numerous than assaults on Jews. In some cities they were endemic.

The troubling aspect of the new anti-Semitism was that while, once again, Jews were the victims, now it was Arabs (or Muslims) who were the perpetrators. The only exception to this rule appeared to be in Germany, where the renascent extreme Right did not trouble itself to distinguish between immigrants, Jews and other ‘non- Germans’. But Germany, for obvious reasons, was a special case. Elsewhere the public authorities worried more about the growing alienation of their Arab and other Muslim communities than they did about any putative revival of Fascism. They were probably right.

In contrast to the United States, which continued to treat ‘Islam’ and Muslims as a distant challenge, alien and hostile, best addressed by heightened security and ‘pre-emptive war’, Europe’s governments had good reason to see the matter very differently. In France especially, the crisis in the Middle East was no longer a matter of foreign policy: it had become a domestic problem. The transmigration of passions and frustrations from persecuted Arabs in Palestine to their angry, dispirited brethren in Paris should not have come as a surprise—it was, after all, another legacy of empire.

XXIV. Europe as a Way of Life

‘A free Health Service is a triumphant example of the superiority of collective action and public initiative applied to a segment of society where commercial principles are seen at their worst’.

Aneurin Bevan

‘We want the people at Nokia to feel we all are partners, not bosses and employees. Perhaps that is a European way of working, but for us, it works’.

Jorma Ollila (CEO, Nokia)[402]

‘Europeans want to be sure that there is no adventure in the future. They have had too much of that’.

Alfons Verplaetse (Governor, Belgian National Bank) 1996

‘America is the place to come when you are young and single. But if it is time to grow up, you should return to Europe’.

(Hungarian businessman in public opinion survey, 2004)

‘Modern society… is a democratic society to be observed without transports of enthusiasm or indignation’.

Raymond Aron

The burgeoning multiplicity of Europe at the end of the twentieth century: the variable geometry of its regions, countries and Union; the contrasting prospects and moods of Christianity and Islam, the continent’s two major religions; the unprecedented speed of communications and exchange within Europe’s borders and beyond them; the multiplicity of fault lines that blur what had once been clear-cut national or social divisions; uncertainties about past and future alike; all these make it harder to discern a shape to the collective experience. The end of the twentieth century in Europe lacks the homogeneity implicit in confident descriptions of the previous fin-de-siecle.

All the same, there was emerging a distinctively European identity, discernible in many walks of life. In high culture—the performing arts in particular—the state had retained its subventionary role, at least in Western Europe. Museums, art galleries, opera companies, orchestras and ballet troupes all depended heavily, in many countries exclusively, on generous annual grants from public funds. The egregious exception of post-Thatcherite Great Britain, where the national lottery had relieved the Treasury of some of the burden of cultural support, was misleading. Lotteries are merely another device for raising public revenue: they are just more socially regressive than the conventional collection agencies.[403]

The high cost of such public funding had raised doubts about the possibility of sustaining lavish grants indefinitely, particularly in Germany, where during the Nineties some of the Lander governments began to question the generous scale of their outlays. Public subsidies in Germany typically defrayed over 80 percent of the cost of running a theatre or opera house. But culture at this level was closely bound up with status and with regional identity. The City of Berlin, despite growing deficits and stagnant receipts, supported three full-time houses: the Deutsche Oper (the former West Berlin opera); the Staatsoper (the former East Berlin opera); and the Komische Oper, to which should be added the Berlin Chamber Orchestra and the Philharmonic. All drew on considerable public assistance. Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Dresden, Freiburg, Wurzburg and many other German cities continued to support first-rate international ballet or opera companies,