[BRIEF NOTE] A Question for Europeans

[rfmcdonald]

Back in November, Pearsall Helms wrote the interesting post "Things Americans don't understand about Europe". The central point of this post is that Americans do not understand how national identities in Europe are primordial, and that immigrants simply cannot pick up these new identities easily.

In most parts of Europe, at least in my experience, the indigenous populations tend to see themselves as having national identities that are intertwined with their ethnic/tribal identities, in a way that is completely different from American nationality, which is an ideological concept detached from 'blood-and-soil' legacies. For example, I doubt that by this point in history anywhere near a majority of white Americans can trace their ancestry to a single European ethnic group (my father's roots go to Germany and Northern Ireland and my mother's ancestors, who all arrived before the American Revolution, are from Britain, Holland, and possibly other places that we don't know about because it was so long ago), whereas in Europe you will have far far far more people who can say "all my ancestors back as far as I know have been German/French/Polish/whatever".

There are outliers, sure, like Switzerland (although the Swiss are pretty careful about separating 'foreigners' from the existing German, French, and Italian groups), and in a sense the United Kingdom falls into that category too, but mostly there is a broad connection between ethnic and national identities. Consider that in Germany, the grandchildren of Turkish immigrants are still unequivocally 'Turks' while freshly-arrived volksdeutsch (ethnic Germans) from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are pretty much immediately granted citizenship and seen as fundamentally German. Or the recent referendum in Ireland where 79.17% of voters voted to end the automatic right to citizenship of all babies born in Ireland. Americans have generally remained placid about levels of immigration (illegal and legal) that far outsrip in percentage terms what the various European nations receive.

[. . .]

In a lot of parts of continental Europe, you may speak the language, you may dress the same way as the locals, you may have been born there, but to many (the majority?) of the locals, you are fundamentally an outsider. You are always going to be a Turk, or an Arab, or an African, and that is that. The multiculturalism that is officially encouraged doesn't help matters because it legitimizes ethnic separation and encourages the local population to see the newcomers as a permanent foreign presence.

I don't contest Pearsall's analysis; he is, after all, in Europe. The problem that I have with it, though, is that it seems to go against the realities of massive immigration. In the case of France, for instance, Gérard Noiriel has examined the dynamics behind immigrant assimilation in France: Belgians and Italians and Spanish and Poles in the Third Republic, Maghrebins and Portuguese and Italians and Chinese and ex-colonials in the Fifth, France has taken on proportionally as many immigrants as the United States since the end of the Second Empire. Germany's immigration history might seem at first glance rather shorter, but quite apart from the massive immigrations into West Germany after the Second World War, Germany has managed to successfully assimilate, among other groups, the the Ruhr-Poles (German-language link). Saskia Sassen's Financial Times article "The migration fallacy", published on the 27th of December, talks at length about this selective historical amnesia.

Each phase of European Union enlargement has raised the spectre of mass migrations from poverty to prosperity. The prospect of Turkish membership is only the latest development to prompt concerns that western Europe will be unable to absorb such movements.

But western Europe actually has a history of assimilating millions of immigrants, albeit with difficulty. That is why, following five centuries of intra-European migration, Europeans are a rather mixed people: one-quarter of French people, for instance, have a foreign-born parent or grandparent; in Vienna, the figure is 40 per cent. How did Europe achieve this integration?

Immigration hovers in the penumbra of official European history. If anything, Europe has traditionally thought of itself as a continent of emigration, not of immigration. Yet immigration is part of the landscape. In the 18th century, when Amsterdam built its polders and cleared its bogs, it brought in northern German workers. When the French built their vineyards, they employed Spaniards. When London built its water and sewerage infrastructure, the Irish provided the labour. In the 19th century, when Baron Haussmann rebuilt Paris, he brought in Germans and Belgians. When Germany built its railways and steel mills it used Italians and Poles.

This was not immigration on a small scale. Europe - not the Americas, as is usually thought - was the main destination for Italians in their century of emigration from 1876 to 1976. About 12.6m Italians went to other European countries, 1m more than emigrated to non-European countries. And while the US was the country that received the largest number of Italians - with 5.7m - France was not that far behind, with 4.1m. Switzerland, smaller still, received 4m, Germany 2.4m and Austria 1.2m.

Three features of these migrations of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are relevant today. One is the intensity and short duration - often about 15 years - of periods of high demand for immigrants. There is a strong possibility that Europe will need more immigrants - and sooner than Europeans think - given the continued demand for low-wage workers and the forecast that the population of the EU's 15 pre-enlargement members will have dropped by 88m by the end of this century. A second feature is the astounding capacity of European countries to absorb immigrants - more than 20m since the second world war. The final feature is the extent to which big immigration flows - such as Turks and Moroccans - consisted disproportionately of groups - such as Kurds or Berbers - with strong reasons for leaving their home country.

What is clear from history is that most Europeans do not want to emigrate. The same trends can be expected when it comes to the EU's new members. Most emigrants are likely to be from very specific groups, such as the Roma, or, in a novel development, from among the middle- class young, who increasingly think of themselves as "Europeans". The Roma will come to stay, the young mostly to play for a while before returning home.

From a modern perspective, these historic flows of immigrants look comparatively easy to handle. Most were moving from countries that are now long-term members of the EU. Today, migration between those countries is uncontroversial. But in their time, such movements were a much more sensitive issue. These migrants were the outsiders - they looked different and they had different cultures. Although, over the centuries, many of today's EU citizens can trace themselves back to these migrations, when they arrived in their new countries, they seemed overwhelmingly alien to the inhabitants. Anti-immigrant sentiment was common.

Today, these same religious, racial and cultural differences are invoked by those who believe assimilation of immigrants is impossible. The historical record suggests Europeans were equally negative about those who today are considered insiders: German and Belgian workers in France, Italians in Germany, and so on.

Europe's highly developed sense of civic and political community meant that the division between insiders and outsiders was clear. To incorporate newcomers required work and it took generations to achieve; to contemporaries, it often seemed an impossible task. The key to this struggle was political innovation. Indeed, this is the enduring legacy of assimilation of outsiders: it forced nationals of European countries to develop and strengthen their civic and political institutions. Europe's highly regarded burghers started out as outsiders, fighting for rights against the nobility. Every big immigration phase pushed Europeans to invent legal instruments to handle the matter. Immigrants today are part of the complex, highly heterogeneous "We" of any developed society. Racism is still alive and well, but so are membership rights.

Europeans' highly developed sense of political membership made it hard to absorb new immigrants, but it also forced them to come up with formal rules for including outsiders. Such innovation was part of the fight against the many natives who used existing institutions to argue against inclusion. In many ways, the history of the EU's development is the ultimate example of this effort.

Public debate today neglects this history of hard civic, political and legal work. In the past, we crafted incorporation over decades. But these days - when products and services are readily available to tackle just about any problem - the expectation seems to be that, if there is not an instant solution, there is no solution at all.

Sassen, though, says very little about the reasons for these convenient lacuna. What factors--social, economic, political--lie behind the creation of this yawning gaps in the national memories of Europe? (And not only Europe, mind, but leave that aside for now.)