A Financial Times editorial from 23rd December refers to Amartya Sen's 'Identity and Violence' and finishes with:
"Across the west, the children and grandchildren of immigrants often
get cut off from their country, language and culture of origin before
they become integrated into their new host country. In the case of
Muslims (but others too), there is in addition the sense of a religion
under siege and a lament for past grandeur. This makes the immigrant
doubly a foreigner - and easy prey to bigots or jihadis who would make
of their religious affiliation the basis of the identity they long for.
It is often in the diaspora, moreover, that harder, more angular
versions of religious and ethnic identity emerge.
Governments
typically make the mistake, moreover, of addressing artificial
aggregates such as the "Muslim Community". They thereby devalue other
aspects of their identity, push religion to the fore and magnify the
influence of religious authority.
History should remind us it is
catastrophic to identify people in terms of only one facet of their
identity. Emphasising religion, moreover, fosters a dangerous politics
of wounded identity.
But beyond any single facet of identity,
language or nation, colour or gender, class or religion, political and
religious leaders need to do a far more convincing job of asserting
values: the universality of human and democratic rights under the rule
of law, the right of all humans to dignity and cultural liberty. These
are shared values that should never be subject to any form of
relativism or moral commerce."
The editorial asserts earlier that Western and developed countries have failed to integrate immigrant communities in the past half century. Have we really failed to integrate previous immigrant communities? I vaguely remember we were having this kind of debate in the 1980s with the Brixton riots, worrying that the Afro Caribbean communities had not been properly integrated into British society. This does not seem to be such an issue now - or maybe it still is, but has been drowned out by the issue of integration of immigrants from Muslim countries. Is the consensus that it is all a matter of time - the next generation of whatever immigrant group will integrate and be less economically excluded? There is surely a larger Afro Caribbean middle class now than there was 20 years ago. But then unemployment in general is far less high than it was in the early 1980s.
So should we be optimistic that the alienation of some immigrants from Muslim countries is temporary and time will be the healer? Or are conditions different this time? I keep using the description 'from Muslim countries', so perhaps that is the key difference - religion. There are branches of Christianity and Christian churches in the UK which are predominantly Afro-Caribbean, but they have not supported violent separatist tendencies, as far as I know.
Or is it that British society has changed? We are more diverse, more disparate than we were 20 or 30 years ago, so there is less of an obvious common culture, ethos, establishment to integrate with. This reasoning is no doubt behind the government policies of having citizenship tests, citizenship classes and trying to define British values.
A comment on Dave Hill's blog at commentisfree, if true, has made me wonder if the root of the problem is the non-integration of the first wave of immigrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan etc in the 1970s, and that their attitudes have been retained and even radicalised by their childen:
"I agreed with all the points made by Mr Blair. However, there was one
point with which I disagreed with the Prime Minister with respect to
his recent address. he gave the impression that imigrants arriving from
lets say for example Pakistan were refusing to integrate. This is not
so, ask any school teacher and you will find that the new arrivals are
vey keen to integrate, they are articulate and liberal thnking. The
problem is the existing BRITISH Pakistanis, born in the UK who are
failing to integrate, and what makes this even worse is that these
children are usually born to British born mothers. The syndrome can be
likened to the 'ethnic bubble' or 'space pod'. The space pod left the
mothership and stays with its last memory of the mothership (in this
case perhaps a village mentality). BUT the mothership has moved on and
progressed, the space pods holds on to out dated memories and does not
recognise the new reality. This is not perculiar to Pakistanis but to
other cultures. So Mr Blair failed to recognise this very important
point and it was one of the issues raised by the muslim scholar Tariq
Ramadan"
I used to live in the East End of London, and go canvassing for Labour in 1990-1992 and then again 1998-2000. The change was noticeable even between those two periods. In the early 1990s the door of a Bengali household would take some time to open, if at all, and be answered by a woman adjusting her veil nervously, surrounded by small children, who would do their best to interpret my questions for her. The response was almost always 'oh yes all Labour here'. During the later canvassing, the door would be opened by the children, now young adults, who would be fluently cagey in English and less positive about Labour.
So if the problem is that the parents of alienated second or third generation immigrant youth still have an outdated view of their mothership country, and (the mothers in particular I sense) never integrated enough with the host country to have a positive view of it, what can be done?
Tony Blair suggested some practical ideas in his December 8th speech to the Runnymede Trust. He is quite specific that it is a problem emanating from a minority of Muslims, and not a general one of extremism, which is brave, as is his non-condemnatory reference to Jack Straw's comment about veil wearing.
To summarise, he suggests:
1) we talk openly about the problem
2) we define our common values and make it clear that citizens should conform to them
3) grants to community groups who promote integration
4) equality of respect and treatment for all citizens, specifically prevent forced marriages
5) adherence to the rule of civil law, not religious law
6) stricter conditions of entry for visiting preachers
7) teaching citizenship in schools including ensuring faith schools teach tolerance and respect for other faiths (maybe someone in speech and policy writing circles did read my letter to the Financial Times after all...)
8) share a common language - English ability as a requirement for citizenship.
9) tackle low educational achievement as a means to preventing economic and social deprivation
All sound reasonable, but maybe there is some locking of doors after horses have bolted, if the problem lies in earlier generations and their impact on their children?