- The Observer,
- Sunday June 9, 2002
But Europe's political establishment is running scared. European governments are in an unseemly competition to put up barriers and reassure electorates that the supply lines of alien 'others' are being shut down.
Last week there were two more upward ratchets in the race to tell the rest of the world that Europe is closed. Denmark's right-wing government (supported by the anti-immigration People's Party) forced through draconian rules on immigration, including limiting access to full unemployment benefit for seven years to any immigrant legal or illegal and disallowing any application for asylum in a consulate or embassy. In other words, only those in Denmark can apply for asylum, and then on a much tougher definition in which threat of famine or war will no longer count.
Meanwhile, the Italian lower house of parliament voted through a bill, spearheaded by the two quasi-fascist parties, to insist that immigrants must have a prior offer of work to enter the country, while fingerprinting non-EU nationals alongside a whole harsh new apparatus of detention, arrest and yearly imprisonment of illegal immigrants - a stigmatisation of immigrants and asylum-seekers that has ominous echoes.
Britain's tightening of the law on asylum-seekers seems almost liberal by comparison, with its provisions for citizenship tests and the speeding up of processing. Yet the language used by both the Home Secretary and the leader of the Opposition comes from the same stable as that deployed by the Italian and Danish Right.
Mr Blunkett, like Bertel Haarder, Denmark's immigration minister, has no time for arranged marriages, seeing them as culturally unacceptable while serving a useful way of evading immigration laws, while Mr Duncan Smith's demand that Britain accept none of the occupants of Sangatte whatever the legitimacy of their claim for asylum could have been made by Italy's extreme Right parties.
Indeed, the Blair Government - cited in both the Italian and Danish parliaments - has become political cover for the entire European Right.
Small wonder that the issue is to be top of the agenda of the Seville European Council in 12 days time, with Italy, Spain, Belgium, France and Germany proposing joint border police to crack down on illegal immigration as the centrepiece of a tougher, harder EU attitude to immigration. The race is on for the EU to come up with something as tough as its Right-of-centre member governments demand, or they will take unilateral action - as in Denmark and Italy.
The challenge is overt. The EU must make itself fortress Europe or member states will establish their own immigration policies, making a mockery of ambitions to create pan-European structures. With emotions running so high the Commission is doing well even to keep alive the notion that in parallel with all this there must be measures to show that legal immigration can benefit host societies; it is what no one wants to hear. As Italy and Denmark close their doors, so they displace pressure onto other European states who come under pressure to follow suit, whatever the EU says.
As Godfrey Hodgson argues in the New Statesman, what is happening in Europe echoes the collapse of American liberalism as southern and conservative American politicians have played the race card against liberal notions of affirmative action and racial integration. Once working class voters start blaming foreigners, blacks, and immigrants for their ills the Right gains ground. In Britain, New Labour's strategy has been to cut the Right off from exploiting the issue by occupying the terrain itself; in mainland Europe no Left party has been able or wanted to adopt the same strategy. In any case it's Hobson's choice; either discard a liberal position to hold power, or remain true to principles but be forced to the political margins.
But there is another, even more ominous implication of what is happening. In The Shield of Achilles, Philip Bobbit - historian, security strategist and former adviser to both the White House and the Senate - argues that the legitimacy of the modern state lies less in its democratic base but in its success in war. States have arisen by their capacity to offer their individual citizens territorial security and deal with external threats of which war is the most complete.
Thus war itself arises from a calculation about sustaining the state that is wholly rational because this is the ultimate reason for the state's being and legitimacy. The difficulty now is that this basis for earning legitimacy disappeared after the collapse of the Cold War - which Bobbit sees as part of a sustained conflict that began in 1914 over what kind of state (fascist, communist or parliamentarian) should prevail in the international order.
The victory of parliamentary states does not mean the end of conflict, though, since all states need conflict as their ultimate source of legitimacy - and just as over the past 500 years states have gone into battle as a means of legitimising themselves, so they will again even if in different kinds of conflict.
Bobbit's thesis is controversial - but backed by a weight of historical evidence. His mapping of the various triggers to conflict is exhaustive, of which the challenges faced by immigration is but one. Yet it is easy to see how the actions of European governments fit his thesis; these are states asserting their legitimacy with their citizens by acting aggressively against a perceived external threat. Globalisation has both created the flows of migrants and made it necessary for states to earn their legitimacy by acting against them - and in the process sidelined each country's liberal and Left tradition.
The only bulwark against this process would have been a powerful EU that could offer citizens a guarantee that they were not about to be 'swamped' and a vision of Europe that could benefit from immigration. It hasn't happened; the pass is being sold and if you share liberal values it is becoming more obvious by the week that they are being seriously and menacingly challenged. It is time to stand up and be counted.
