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Islam, European Identity and the Limits of Multiculturalism

Sami ZEMNI*

Introduction

With the end of the Cold War, Europe set out on a new phase of expansion and integration. One of the new topics related to the process of European integration is a concern with the construction of a European identity and citizenship. The European Union has defined itself during the last decade as a multicultural community sharing a set of universal values. Indeed, the ideals of democracy, tolerance and human rights have become the main identity markers of the Union. It is possible to subsume this ‘shared value-set’ under the general concept of multiculturalism.

During the last decade the debate on multiculturalism has taken shape as a legitimising paradigm of the Western democracies, and of the European Union itself. It has developed into a cultural-political cornerstone of societies simultaneously in full transition towards economic globalisation on the one hand, and potentially prey to the advent/resurgence of far-right and/or fascist political organizations on the other hand. Multiculturalism is much more than the de facto acknowledgement of the living together of people with different religious traditions, ethnic loyalties or national affiliations. Multiculturalism is the basis of a (supra-national) societal project with universal aspirations. In that sense defining multiculturalism has become a stake of political conflict, one of the irreversible references for self-respecting democracies.

Every universal concept, including multiculturalism, becomes only comprehensible and practical when actors imbue it with a typical content that exemplifies its abstract character. This typifying content is, in Zizek’s terms “the element of fantasy, of the phantasmic background/support of the universal ideological notion. (…) (It) is by no means an insignificant illustration or exemplification” (Zizek 1997: 29). It is, on the contrary, the level on which ideological battles are fought, won or lost. The lack of substance of the abstract universal term is thus translated into (a) concept(s) that supposedly cover(s) its social reality. In the debate on multiculturalism ‘Islam’ and/or ‘Muslims’ have come to play a significant role. ‘Islam’ or more accurately ‘the problem of Islam in Europe’ has become an ideological battlefield within Europe that is showing us the boundaries and limits of multiculturalism[1].

The debate on Islam in Europe is constructed and produced by various actors (academics, politicians, intellectuals, social workers, journalists, Muslims…) who all have their own discourse within a certain context. The context of the debate shapes its structures and determines the content of discourses of the protagonists involved. It is nearly impossible to say anything on ‘Islam in Europe’ without taking into account the structural context of the debate. This context can be defined as ‘post-politics’. Post-politics is the situation in which “the conflict between the ideological world-visions, as embodied in different parties that are in competition over the exercise of power, is being replaced by the cooperation of enlightened technocrats (economists, opinion polls…) and liberal multiculturalists that leads to a compromise that is attained by way of negotiation and the watching of interests, and is presented as a more or less universal consensus.” (Zizek 1998: 25).

Simultaneously, this context is, in a period of globalisation, breaking out of the geographical boundaries of the European Union. With the advent of Islamist movements in the Arab world and the synchronicity of Muslim demands in Europe, several observers have concluded that we are witnessing a worldwide ‘resurgence of Islam’ or, in more pejorative terms, a ‘threat’ or ‘clash’ (Huntington 1997). In both cases, the simplicity with which the so-called resurgence is coupled to the emancipation of Muslims in Europe, has engendered an ‘anti-Muslimism’ (De Ley 1999) within the European Union. 

We want to show how the ‘problem of Islam in Europe’ is shaping the debate around the advent of a multicultural Europe. The mere existence (and general acceptance) of the object of research ‘Islam in Europe’ is showing us the horizons against which this debate takes place. The numerous controversies surrounding the object tell us that the mere postulation of ‘the problem of Islam in Europe’ is much more than a simple acknowledgement of an easy to grasp empirical reality.

Therefore we want to argue that the whole debate is conditioned by an identity concern. The structures of the debate are couched in a set of binary oppositions which tend to ‘name’ the distinct identities present in the Union as much as the limits of Western claims to universal multiculturalism. This means that all the protagonists in the debate (whether in dominant/hegemonic position or subaltern) are obliged to couch their discourse within an identity framework. It is the imposition of that framework that (partly) defines the position of the protagonists in the debate with their academic, political and/or societal interests and affiliations.

We want to focus on the intellectual and/or academic constructions of difference as part and parcel of the creation of a ‘European identity’ and particularly in what ways ‘Islam’ is used within this process of identity formation. With ‘European identity’ I refer to “the disposition of different nationals to consider themselves, their compatriots and their foreign fellow-Europeans as equal members of the European community” (Lehning s.d.). It is thus the production of an identity that is surpassing the nation-state, the locus of the classic national affiliations. It tries to implement rights and duties to individuals as belonging to the supra-national European Union instead of individuals belonging to several member-states.

In the first section I want to address the issue of the formation of a ‘European identity’ after the Cold War and show how the economic logic behind the European unification is silenced and replaced by a ‘cultural’ discourse that opens up the way for the ideological formation of ‘cultural differences’, whether in its multicultural or racist versions.

In the second section I will discuss the intellectual mechanisms that are used to describe Islam and that obstruct knowledge of that religion. We will not dwell extensively on the constructed images itself but on the theoretical mechanisms of thought that construct these images.

Finally, in the third section I will show how the flawed debate on Islam within the Union is endangering the multicultural project itself and is therefore a possible threat to the creation of a tolerant and pluralist Europe.

I do not wish to obliterate the complex differences between the countries of the Union. Both the structures of racism and the academic production of difference, fluctuate considerably from one country to another. This essay should be seen as an attempt to construct a theoretical framework that enables us to understand how academics and intellectuals produce difference and, more specifically, in relation to Islam and the presence of Muslims within the European Union.

Europe, Identity and Islam

Forty years of Cold War came to an end with the collapse of communism in the Soviet-Union and in Eastern Europe. Even the Cuban thorn in the American eye could not temper the optimism. Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history as capitalism had won the ideological battle of the century. From now on the world was marching unanimously towards liberal democracy, human rights, etc. The notable exception to this trend – according to the sages of this idea – is the Islamic world (Fukuyama 1992).

The optimism was, all in all, but short lived. The instable Commonwealth of Independent States crumbled and gave way to a multiplicity of independent states, a second Gulf War broke out, and in Africa several conflicts erupted after being ‘frozen’ during decennia under Cold War-logic. George Bush’s dream of a pax universalis under the American flag was short-lived. Instead, politicians all around the globe returned to the nostalgia of more certainty. Willy Claes, the then NATO secretary-general, pinpointed ‘Islamic fundamentalism’[2] as the new threat to Europe. As the former enemy had disappeared, NATO had to look for a new scapegoat.

It is within this geopolitical situation that the European Union set out to define a new identity for its supranational agenda as more and more Eastern European countries started knocking on the Union’s doors. The central question for the European Union was who could join the Union and who not and on which basis? Suddenly, it had to answer questions such as where Europe started geographically and where it ended? What were the boundaries of Europe and how were they to be defined? Answering these questions is a typical example of an identity construction. Identity is by definition the product of an uninterrupted chain of conflict situations because of the fact that the production of an identity is only possible in relation to an Other. As Malek Chebel puts it, identity is “a subjective structure which is characterized by the representation of the interaction between the individual, the Others (prerequisite to the existence of an identity: to see one self as one and to be seen by the Others as such) and the context (as the material agent of identification)” (Chebel 1986: 36-37). A discourse on identity thus always separates Us from the Other, independent from the variable or criterion that is used to differentiate.

But what then defines Europe? What makes it possible for the European Union to incorporate some countries and others not? There are many different languages within the European Union, so the language criterion cannot account for a valuable identity marker. There are several religions and a growing number of seculars, atheists or agnostics and is therefore also a useless marker. The European Union cannot argue that there is a difference between orthodox and non-orthodox Christianity that could account for inclusion/exclusion in/of the Union. Some academics and intellectuals have however tried to define Europe in religious terms. Huntington, for example, divides Europe into an orthodox and non-orthodox Christianity, thereby reflecting the geopolitical and economic interests of the United States. Alexandre Del Valle on the other hand constructs a very catholic Europe that is, by definition superior to Islam and the ‘culture of the United States’. “Islamism, in the traditional meaning of Islamic civilization, is hostile to Europe and the West … Islam remains, as a conquering civilization, fundamentally different and adversary to European civilization” (Del Valle 1997: 14).  But what Del Valle calls the third Muslim invasion of Europe is, for the sake of his case, a gift. It makes him possible to chart imaginary threats to Europe and map out catholic and conservative policies as solutions to the perceived threats. He advises Europe to embrace a ‘healthy nationalism, a new Catholicism and advises for a repopulation’. “If the Europeans do not arrive at persuading, within a short time, their spouses of the envy and pride in giving them a progenitor, then the ‘new cavaliers of Islam’ will not hesitate to repopulate Europe” (Del Valle 1997: 18).  

It has been argued that Europe is only a vague geographical entity. It has defined itself since the Renaissance as the locus of modern civilization much more than a geographical unit. In this sense Europe as an idea and the European Union as a supra-national political entity tries to define itself as the carrier of the universal values of democracy, tolerance and human rights. As we can read in the “Charter of European Identity”: 

“Europe is above all a community of values. The aim of European unification is to realize, test, develop and safeguard these values. They are rooted in common legal principles acknowledging the freedom of the individual and social responsibility. Fundamental European values are based on tolerance, humanity and fraternity. Building on its historical roots in classical antiquity and Christianity, Europe further developed these values during the course of the Renaissance, the Humanist movement, and the Enlightenment, which led in turn to the development of democracy, the recognition of fundamental and human rights, and the rule of law.” (Charter).

This normative definition of the European identity is used to mask the uttermost economic logic behind the Union and it’s extension. After the breakdown of communism, it was the economically interesting countries (e.g. Hungary, Poland, Slovenia) that were eligible for inclusion in the Union. The ideological legitimation of this enterprise was based on the so-called existence of ‘Central Europe’. Detrez (Detrez 2000) has shown how this idea of Central Europe was created during the eighties by well-known intellectuals and writers such as Konrad or Kundera. The idea was given a new content as of the 1990s. Central Europe became the ‘natural’ extension of the European Union as it shared those cherished values of tolerance, democracy and freedom. The incredible fascination that lived within the European Union towards the aftermath of communism in Eastern Europe, made it possible to rethink itself as the birthplace of democracy. Eastern Europe, on the brink of liberal democracy, became an ideal vantage point for the European Union to see itself in a positive way, an idealized lovable entity. Needless to say that this construction of an identity was in turn used to make Russia and the Balkans the new ‘Others’.  

The concealment of the economic logic behind European expansion is not the work of a ‘conspiracy’ of managers, bankers or industry lobbies. It is the outcome of the late capitalist logic at work in globalisation where the economy is seen as a value-free field responding automatically to the wants and needs of the people. As capitalism is unquestioned – as there is no alternative at hand – it seems that critical people have engaged in the outlet of the fight for multiculturalism, the right(s) and protection of cultural differences. Off course these two enterprises are dialogical as the growing success of cultural discourses (on religion, identity, ethnicity, local community, etc.) is covering up and giving credentials to the idea of the ‘neutrality of capitalism’. This logic is particularly visible in the debates on membership applications to the Union. The Union posited three basic conditions for membership: European identity, democratic status and respect for human rights (Delgado-Moreiras 1997). The vagueness and abstract character of these conditions make them very malleable instruments of policy.  

The ideals of the enlightenment, however laudable they may be, are reified[3] in such a way that they become synonyms of Europe and its history. Wars of religion, civil wars, the Endlösung, pogroms, the treatment of gypsies, discrimination based on religion, race, culture or colour are all but mere ‘accidents’ on the golden paved road of European democracy and human rights. European intolerance is thus not part of a certain culture, heritage or tradition[4]. The hegemonic discourse on European identity is therefore a typical power process in which a mechanism of self-censorship and concealment is at work[5]. By denying the fact that Europe has indeed a long history of wars, intolerance or xenophobia, the opposite appearances are maintained. Maintaining these appearances is very important for the hegemonic discourse of self-definition. If overtly racist attitudes would be endorsed publicly then this would radically shift the balance of ideological hegemony. It is therefore that far-right political parties are not directly remaking traditional fascist or racist ideologies. They are rearticulating and translating them into the contemporary spectrum of publicly possible discourses. Therefore they do not speak on ‘the size of brains of the black race’, ‘the form of the nose of Semitic people’ or ‘the physical inferiority of Asians’ but talk instead of ‘our own people first’, ‘stop migration’ or ‘immigrants are the cause of all criminality in Europe’. It is clear that this is inducing a strong hypocrisy that is more and more posited as social principle. As long as European policy makers deny the existence of racism and xenophobia within our societies, it is easy to pretend that it does not exist.

The consequence of all this is that the debate on the European Union is more and more couched in cultural terms. The economic rhetoric is blurred and replaced by a new emphasis on the cultural. The shift in the public debate and academia is clearly obvious, as culturalism and essentialization have regained prominence. The debate on Islam is couched in cultural terms and not in terms of flows of migration, societal discrimination or class politics. Therefore Barry Buzan (1991) argues that a ‘societal Cold War’ between Islam and Europe is in fact functional for the latter as it would serve to strengthen European identity at a crucial time for its ongoing unification. Etienne Balibar (2000) comes to the same conclusion when he states that the ‘immigrant’ (not only the Muslim) is by definition a ‘second class citizen’ because while the European identity is getting a more real content, immigrants are excluded from full inclusion in the Union they are helping to build up. As Delgado-Moreira (1997) argues, the construction of a European identity is neglecting the cultural demands of the minorities within the member-states and fails to produce a pluralist reading of identity.

Islam in Europe: Mechanisms of creating otherness

In this following chapter we want to focus on the ‘phantasmagoric effect’[6] (Euben 1999) that is induced by the European self-definition. Islam, as we will see, is depicted in certain strong images that are constructed as radically opposed to this European self-definition. However, this essay will not dwell extensively on the images themselves but on the mechanism that make these images possible and publicly admissible. The phantasmagoric effect is indeed a concealment of these mechanisms so as to prove that they are real. Debunking these mechanisms is a way of showing how the work of self-censorship is defining the European self and how, at the same time, it translates the confining structures of the debate surrounding ‘Islam in Europe’.

Who is to study Islam and the Muslims?

The contemporary division of labour within the European academic institutions is an indirect consequence of decisive social transformations during the 19th century. The formation of the European modern nation-states gave rise to a demand for new knowledge needed to unravel, understand and supervise those major societal changes. From this question arose the several different scientific disciplines within the social sciences and the humanities. The university grew again to its status of central locus of the formation of knowledge and several new or renewed disciplines were organized and/or revived in new ways. This division of labour ended in an epistemological division of human behaviour on the theoretical level (Calouste Gulbenkian 1996). Every academic discipline started to deal with only one or a few aspects/parts of human behaviour. Sociologists went on a search for universally valid laws on societal relationships that were emptied of their political, economic or cultural background. Social reality was presented as a totality of societies (that were non other than the modern nation-states) in which people had relations that were causal and autonomous and who were understandable for social cohesion and/or conflict. Economists defined their object of research not as a set of social relations but as a group of actors that are active in the marketplace (household, firms and later also the government). Political scientists focused on the mechanisms of decision making in all its facets and nuances. Next to these three disciplines, two other disciplines were used to study the non-Western world. The first one, anthropology, had to scrutinize the life of ‘primitive and underdeveloped’ societies, especially in Africa and Oceania. The second, Orientalism, a discipline that had existed for centuries but was revived and modified, had to study those cultures that once, in a long forgotten past, where flourishing civilizations but who were by now undoubtedly driven into immobility, decadence and stagnation. Orientalism was especially busy with the study of the Islamic, Indian and Chinese civilizations.

The creation of modern Orientalism is thus related to a normative worldview in which the West is centrally located. Orientalism became part of the Humanities and not of the social sciences, which gives already an insight to its privileged methods of inquiry, i.e. textual philological analyses. That Orientalism has undergone a lot of changes during the last century is undeniable; however, the normative legitimation of this academic discipline is still a big issue in several debates. 

The study of Islam within Europe is fragmented, as it is both studied by orientalists and social scientists.  The growth of the number of Muslims in European countries in the 1960s and 70s engendered a growing demand of knowledge of the governmental authorities. Who are those immigrants? How do they live their religion? How do they experience they migrating experience? … All of these questions were mainly researched by social scientists, as the perspective of analyses was that of migration (Kanmaz 1999). Orientalists remained pretty much silent on the issue during those years. It is only with the growing importance of the concept of culture (in its several complex definitions) that orientalists came to the fore in the debate during the 1980s.

This evolution was the consequence of large-scale political changes on the local, regional and world level but it was also incumbent on paradigmatic changes within Western academic institutions. The growing demand of Muslims in Western Europe, the Iranian revolution, ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ on the growth in the Arab world, all contributed to a renewed interest in Islam and Muslims.

The advent of Islamism on the political scene coincides with the growing tendency of the deconstructing of leading social science paradigms. It is hard to find any study within the social sciences on the role of Islam in politics prior to the Iranian revolution as there was no place for concepts such as religion, culture, ethnicity or race in the teleological narratives of modernization theories whether in its Marxist of liberalist versions. The advent of Islamism on the world political scene thus coincided with the growing critique of social sciences within Western academia. It is around the same time as the Iranian revolution that Saïd's much acclaimed book Orientalism- even though other intellectuals had done such a critique before (Arkoun, Rodinson (1979, 1980), Laroui, Abdel-Malek) - became a bestseller and that French intellectuals coined their new ideas as postmodernist, in a reaction against modernity.

These new tendencies within academic paradigms made a new interest in all things cultural fashionable. This cultural turn within the sciences made Islam into a battlefield of research. Both orientalists and social scientists (who now want to take into account the ‘Islamic factor’) try to promote their epistemological and methodological background as the only one that is truly objective[7]. Orientalist advocate a ‘look from within’, they focus on the normative and dogmatic dimensions of religion in order to understand the internal aspects of Islam. Social scientists on the other hand prefer a ‘look from the outside’ as they focus in the first place on the making of a functional (functional for state and government) knowledge (Van Koningsveld & Tahtah 1998). Albeit the fact that the two viewpoints seem symmetrically opposed to each other, there are numerous interfaces between the two. Those interfaces are the outcome of the process of labour division within Western academia as described above. One of the founders of sociology, Max Weber, paid a lot of attention to the cultural elements within the process of modernization. When he tried to write his seminal comparative sociology of religion (Weber 1965), which was never really completed, Weber was utterly dependent on the available knowledge on Islam that was foremost constructed within the orientalist tradition. One of Weber’s followers in Heidelberg, Carl H. Becker, set out on the ‘sociologizing’ of orientalist knowledge. As Weber saw a similarity between Protestantism and Islam he focused on the question of why capitalism had only come about in the West and not within Islamic culture. In that way Islam and it’s territories became the place ‘that lacked things’ (cities, a middle class, autonomous town institutions, private ownership…)[8]. “(H)e was able to fertilize through a new social-scientific approach the legacy of the traditional (…) model of constructing an opposition between Islam and Christianity, in order to derive the deficits of the former in facing a process of modern differentiation” (Salvatore 1997: 99). It is through this operation that traditional orientalist images were recreated within the social sciences. After World War II, the American Weberian Talcot Parsons influenced the paradigmatic evolution of sociology (Lee 1996, Kiely 1995). His ideas lay at the core of the modernization theories, which seemed to reproduce the same old ideas. Islam was the world of tradition and if it wanted to become modern it had to ‘forget about itself’. As Daniel Lerner puts it: “What the (West) is (…), the Middle East seeks to become” (Lerner 1958: 47).

In the last decennium there has been a wild growth in books, publications, articles etc. with titles such as ‘Islam and democracy’, ‘Islam and human rights’… In this binary or dichotomist thinking, most of the time, two concepts are weighed one against the other. The two terms are mostly defined in essentialist terms and couched in a philological comparison. Concepts such as democracy, human rights or tolerance are idealized as a-historical essences of the West. By dehistoricizing these concepts, they are becoming the basis of Western self-definition, a construction of identity that is held as a mirror into the face of the Other. The second term in the comparison, i.e. Islam, is also essentialized and dehistoricized but than as the mirror image of the West in which Islam is depicted as irrational, not modern, undemocratic, despotic. These constructions are thus based on preconceived notions of the concepts involved in the comparison.

Whether we like it or not, one has to admit that democracy has historically grown within the West. It is not an essence of the West but the particular outcome of centuries long political, economic, social and cultural conflicts. Looking for democracy or human rights within Islam is nothing else than projecting contemporary questions onto the ‘an order that did not create it’ and is therefore much more an exercise in production than of analyses. It is nothing else than the use of historical anachronism as a methodological tool (Roussillon 1999).

Whether one concludes that Islam is compatible with democracy or not, it is obvious that both conclusions result from the same modality of thinking. The superficially contradicting conclusions tend in reality to belong to the same hermeneutical field, structured by the same premises of the debate. When Vermeulen (1999) concludes that Islam and Christianity or democracy are not compatible or Ramadan (1996) comes to an opposite conclusion, both thinkers are caught in the same field. They both use the elasticity of Koranic arguments and selective historical facts that prove both X and its opposite NOT X.