American Difference

President Obama wants European countries to do a better job of assimilating Muslims. Easy for an American President to say. Much harder for European nations to accomplish.

George Friedman argues at Stratfor that “The current crisis has its origins in the collapse of European hegemony over North Africa after World War II and the Europeans’ need for cheap labor. As a result of the way in which they ended their imperial relations, they were bound to allow the migration of Muslims into Europe, and the permeable borders of the European Union enabled them to settle where they chose. The Muslims, for their part, did not come to join in a cultural transformation. They came for work, and money, and for the simplest reasons. The Europeans’ appetite for cheap labor and the Muslims’ appetite for work combined to generate a massive movement of populations.”

But this migration has a “hidden secret: The Europeans do not see Muslims from North Africa or Turkey as Europeans, nor do they intend to allow them to be Europeans. . . . the dirty secret of multiculturalism was that its consequence was to perpetuate Muslim isolation.”

The reason for the isolation lies in Europe’s specific Romantic notion of nationhood: “Europe’s sense of nation is rooted in shared history, language, ethnicity and yes, in Christianity or its heir, secularism. Europe has no concept of the nation except for these things, and Muslims share in none of them. . . . Europe’s nationalism is romantic, naturalistic. It depends on bonds that stretch back through time and cannot be easily broken.” The US has an easier time of it, Friedman argues, since it is “an artificial regime, not a natural one. It was invented by our founders on certain principles and is open to anyone who embraces those principles.” 

Lecturing Europeans on their absorption of Muslims sounds like a lecture to stop being Europe and to become American.