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  The new populists have also effectively claimed the progressive causes of the left—from gay rights to women’s equality and protecting Jews from anti-Semitism—as their own, by depicting Muslim immigrants as the primary threat to all three groups. The result is that liberal Democrats have begun to denounce Islam in the name of defending Enlightenment values, giving birth to a new form of far-right politics dressed up in progressive garb.52 As fear of Islam has spread, with the populist right’s encouragement, these parties have presented themselves as the only true defenders of Western identity and Western liberties—the last bulwark protecting a besieged Judeo-Christian civilization from the barbarians at the gates.

  They have steadily filled an electoral vacuum left open by social democratic and centre-right parties, who ignored festering resentment for years, opting for moral purity and political correctness rather than engaging with their own voters’ growing anger over immigration—some of it legitimate, some of it bigoted. When it was already too late to prevent an exodus of angry working-class voters, establishment parties began to adopt the rhetoric of populist xenophobes, pushing the entire political spectrum to the right.

  Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory were just the beginning—and Marine Le Pen’s defeat does not signal a turning of the tide. The new far right, from Europe to the United States and beyond, is poised to transform the political landscape of Western democracies, either by winning elections or simply by pulling a besieged political centre so far in its direction that its ideas become the new normal. To best understand how we reached this point, let us return to the moment when Muslim immigrants first began to arrive.

  PART I

  FROM STRANGERS TO OUTCASTS

  1

  THE GUESTS WHO OVERSTAYED

  The Dutch colonized the world’s largest Muslim nation for centuries. Their control of Indonesia was a brutal affair. Soldiers sang, “Wipe out that vermin, humiliate their nation / Plant in them the Dutch tricolour that brings civilization.” A future prime minister, Hendrikus Colijn, serving as an officer in Indonesia during the late nineteenth century, wrote to his wife: “I’ve had to gather together 9 women and 3 children, who begged for mercy, and have them shot dead there and then. It was unpleasant work but there was no other way. The soldiers relished spearing them with their bayonets.”1

  When the Dutch finally left in 1949, they evacuated their local allies, the indigenous group known as the Moluccans. Just as the French evacuated the Algerian “harkis,” who had collaborated with the French army, along with the pied-noir settler population, the Dutch brought the Moluccans north. “They had no choice, since the Indonesians would not let the ‘traitors’ go home,” explains the Dutch-born historian Ian Buruma. But the Moluccans weren’t interested in staying in the Netherlands, and the Indonesians had no desire to welcome home traitors. Instead, they were warehoused in the country’s darkest corners, like the former Nazi transit camp of Westerbork, where thousands of Dutch Jews had been held just ten years earlier, before being sent east to the gas chambers.2

  With labour shortages in key industries, the Dutch government—like Germany’s—began to import large numbers of guest workers in the 1960s, most of them from Turkey and Morocco. Back then, it was not a left-wing position to support immigration. It was the free-market right that wanted open borders and pushed for the postwar guest worker scheme; unions and Social Democrats were hesitant, arguing the country should only do this if its own workers did not suffer.

  The guest workers of that era were a boon for business; they did jobs the Dutch didn’t want and accepted low wages. But no one anticipated the long-term consequences. The economic benefits started to look less desirable once it became clear they might not go back. Eventually, they were entitled to certain rights and developed expectations. The only alternative to granting equal social rights was to withhold citizenship based on birth.3

  Some countries like Germany did leave guest workers’ families in legal limbo for many years, barring the domestic-born children of immigrants from gaining nationality, thanks to citizenship laws based on blood descent.4 But the idea of differential rights clashed with fundamental postwar European values. Hitler had tried to build a world based on racial hierarchy. After the war, the idea of excluding racial or religious groups was anathema to everything postwar Europe stood for. And when this modern notion of citizenship ran up against the unexpected presence of migrants, the default was to include rather than exclude foreigners.5 It was one thing to restrict entry at the border; it was something else to deny people access to citizenship once admitted.6

  All modern states distinguish between members and nonmembers. They are closed to outsiders on some level, and the legal consequences of that closure are significant, making citizenship a valuable asset for insiders and a coveted goal for foreigners. No one thinks to question, for instance, the fact that legal foreign residents cannot vote in national elections in most countries.7

  The dilemmas posed by guest workers in Western Europe touched Britain, too. When large numbers of workers from the former colonies showed up after World War II, it was completely unforeseen. As citizens of the Commonwealth, millions of people across the former Empire had the right to come to Britain; when the House of Commons debated citizenship laws in 1948, hardly anyone thought these erstwhile imperial subjects would take up the offer. When they did begin to arrive, Jamaicans were shocked to see whites doing hard manual labour. Others immigrated due to specific local circumstances. When Pakistan built the Mangla Dam in the early 1960s, it displaced huge numbers of people; many of them went to work in the textile factories of northern England. Today, most of Britain’s Pakistani population can trace its roots to the Mirpur district of Kashmir, near the dam. It was not planned; the arrival of Britain’s minority population occurred largely “in a fit of absence of mind.”8

  In France, the arrival of huge numbers of Algerians was directly related to war. Technically, the Algerians who moved to France before 1962 were not even immigrants, though that term is frequently used today to describe them and their children. Algeria was considered an integral part of France throughout the nineteenth century. When France finally granted Algeria independence after a bloody war, those who had enjoyed a special status in mainland France were, overnight, transformed into foreigners.9

  When Holland’s guest workers started to arrive in the 1960s, no one expected them to stay, let alone one day share the rights Dutch citizens enjoyed. When the economy took a downturn during the 1973 oil crisis, they could not simply be evicted. After all, Holland wasn’t like today’s Persian Gulf states, where most of the population is foreign and enjoys no citizenship rights at all.10 Those small authoritarian monarchies can just kick people out; liberal democracies can’t. And as more people remained, it became more difficult to reverse.

  Soon, their wives and children joined them, at a time when many of the men were out of work. “Their stay was supposed to have been temporary, to clean out oil tankers, work in steel factories, sweep the streets,” wrote Buruma.11 Gradually, immigrants moved into working-class areas, and white flight followed. It was only a matter of time before the issue exploded as both the number of immigrants and their demands for a place in society increased.

  For critics of European immigration policy, like the American journalist Christopher Caldwell, the move toward inclusion was a fatal error. Even worse was that it might be the result of postcolonial guilt.12 It’s an argument that was first articulated by the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner in his trenchant attack on white liberal guilt, Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt. For Bruckner, the leftist ideas that were once subversive had become a “new conformism.”13 Europe was still behaving like an imperial power, he argued, but had become “messianic in a minor key.… Our superiority complex has taken refuge in the perpetual avowal of our sins.”14 But while some on the left looked the other way out of conformist solidarity with the third world, others were seething.

  The increasingly hostile r
eaction to these “strangers” in the European capitals of the 1980s and 1990s was not a new phenomenon. The same had occurred a century before. The London Evening Standard warned of “vast foreign areas” and “Jewish anarchist gangs” in the nineteenth century; even Jack the Ripper was assumed to be a Jewish criminal.15 In the United States, Catholic immigrants aroused intense hatred and violent backlash against “papists.” Indeed, anti-Catholicism was a driving force behind the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915; apart from engaging in violent terrorism, the KKK’s primary policy goal was restricting non-Protestant immigration.

  State legislatures in Arkansas, Florida, and Georgia passed “convent inspection laws” allowing the search of Catholic Church property on the grounds that young women were being enslaved as nuns and weapons for an imagined Catholic uprising might be stored there. (Americans fighting for women’s suffrage were often virulently anti-Catholic, a position that prefigured the stance of today’s anti-Islamic feminists.)16 In 1921, a Klansman shot the Irish-born priest James Coyle on his doorstep in Birmingham, Alabama.17

  Anti-Semitism was equally rife. By 1939, Hitler had conquered much of Central Europe, and Jewish refugees were fleeing to any country that would take them. That year, the United States Congress rejected a bill that would have admitted twenty thousand German Jewish children, and public opinion polls showed that 83 percent of Americans were against relaxing immigration restrictions, and more than 60 percent opposed admitting Jewish children fleeing Europe.18

  As late as 1950, mainstream writers in the United States were, like the suffragists, warning of the dangers posed by Catholics.19 Paul Blanshard, the author of American Freedom and Catholic Power, was praised in left-wing magazines like the Nation and the New Republic as he warned of a group incapable of being integrated due to its “undemocratic system of alien control” and adherence to an ideology rooted in “medieval authoritarianism.” Ten years before the election of John F. Kennedy banished anti-Catholic hatred into obscurity, liberal magazines were earnestly praising a xenophobic writer, viewing him as “a committed liberal who saw in the conservatism of the new immigrant neighborhoods a set of grave threats to the foundations of liberalism.”20

  Irish nationalists were also frequently denounced as supporters of terrorist groups across the Atlantic. As the Canadian journalist Douglas Saunders writes, “The public tended to see Irish political violence not as a matter of politics or nationality but simply as an extension of the immigrants’ religion”21—a refrain that is heard again today.22

  When the jobs that had drawn guest workers to Holland began to disappear after the 1973 oil crisis, there were suddenly many foreigners claiming state benefits, accounting for three times as many claims as the native Dutch. But it was frowned upon to criticize these skewed numbers. As the Dutch welfare state frayed and expectations rose, the safety net no longer worked so well.23

  By the 1980s, Holland was suddenly receiving a stream of newcomers who had no familiarity with the country’s peculiar and unique customs—from never closing one’s curtains during the day to cycling everywhere—that sometimes baffle even Brits and Germans. Sexual freedom and respect for gay rights were even more foreign to those from conservative cultures. The Dutch were being forced to explain something that was reflexively understood by natives and that they valued because it was implicit. Many were nostalgic for the days when everyone looked the same and knew what to say and do.24

  By the end of the decade, the terms of debate on the left and the demands made by minorities had begun to shift, too. For decades, immigrants and their children had been focused on demanding equality. “What preoccupied them was not the desire to be treated differently but the fact that they were treated differently,”25 argues Kenan Malik.

  The Iranian government’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989 was a turning point for the left. It was the moment when identity politics, under the banner of antiracism, replaced a commitment to individual liberties on the political left; religious fundamentalists threatening a writer with death no longer activated leftist passions. Rushdie himself was once a leading voice in these antiracism campaigns. He told a television audience in 1982, “Four hundred years of conquest and looting … this stain has seeped into every part of the culture, the language and daily life.… British thought, British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism. It’s still there, breeding lice and vermin.”26

  But for antiracist activists, there seemed to be few results. Years of protests had “done little to dislodge skinheads from the streets, to prevent deportations, or to lessen the pain of beatings in police cells,” writes Malik. “Much of that anger, bitterness and bravado was looking for a new home.” Radical Islamic organizations had a ready pool to draw on at a time when radicals were becoming disillusioned with the left. Meanwhile, the left was abandoning its commitment to universal values and embracing multiculturalism by focusing on people as members of communities rather than as fellow citizens.27 And that meant, for an angry young rebel without a cause, that Islamist fundamentalism was very appealing. Malik’s friend Hassan went from fighting off skinheads in the early 1980s to joining a radical Islamist group at the end of the decade.

  In France, the shift was similar. In 1983, young Frenchmen and women of North African background marched all the way from Lyon to Paris. It was known as the March of the Beurs, a colloquial name for North African Arabs. The movement demanded an end to police brutality and hate crimes and aimed to counter the anti-immigrant vitriol of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National, which was just beginning to emerge as a political force. But that movement quickly faded. In some ways, it was co-opted by the Socialist Party, stripping it of its antiestablishment street cred. Mostly, however, argues the American writer Paul Berman, “the new movement was defeated by a newer movement, which competed for support in the immigrant neighborhoods.” Islamists in Lyon were claiming they were the “true and authentic tribune of the poor and the downtrodden.” In the worldview of the radical left, they seemed to be a true expression of proletarian resistance. “And, in a spirit of Marxist solidarity, the Trotskyists reached out,” writes Berman.28 Even the trade unions were using Islamic rhetoric in their strikes.29

  On the other side of the political spectrum, a new intellectual force was taking shape, centred around the secretive Club de l’Horloge, the Figaro newspaper, and a group of conservative intellectuals, among them the Figaro columnist Alain de Benoist. It was known as GRECE, a French acronym alluding to ancient Greece, which stands for Research and Study Group for European Civilization. The left’s reaction to this new intellectual branch of the right was largely to ignore it. By refusing to engage with their arguments or denouncing them as fascists, the left let the new right’s vanguard evolve in the shadows. But these figures made an indelible impact on the ideology of the FN and the French right more broadly. Ideas like exclusive national preference in allocating social benefits started in those circles in the mid-1980s and remain an integral part of the FN’s platform today.30

  Ahmed Marcouch grew up in rural Morocco without his father, who had gone to Europe as a guest worker. He came to Holland in 1979, when he was ten, speaking neither Arabic nor Dutch, from a village with no electricity, water, schools, or buses. The journey from the Rif mountains was, for him, like being in “a time machine.”31

  The flight from Morocco to Holland is less than three hours, but for a ten-year-old it was “not only 3,000 kilometers” but also “100 years into the future” in terms of clothes and ideas. The family had to travel miles to find halal meat or staples of Moroccan cooking, like olive oil. Ahmed was one of fifteen children. When he arrived, he lived with his father and several siblings in a one-room flat—with a curtain as a separator—in Amsterdam’s east. He soon realized that his father couldn’t fully function in Dutch society and needed his help.

  He and his siblings respected their father as an authority figure, but the role reversal was jarring. “After a few years, you see that your father … d
oesn’t know anything about the society,” he recalls. It was up to the kids to translate. “My father asked me to read for him—the letters from the government.” At the time, Marcouch was twelve and had less than two years of education in any language.32

  At first, he wanted to be a carpenter. Then he got a job in a paper factory and in 1992 became a police officer in one of the rougher parts of the city. In 2010, he was elected as a member of parliament for the Labour Party, with an office larger than the flat he first lived in.33

  Holland is famed as a tolerant society, largely owing to its decriminalization of soft drugs and prostitution and its generally permissive attitude toward everything from premarital sex to gay marriage. But in recent years, the overwhelming political force in society has been fear. And fear and tolerance never go together.

  According to Marcouch, many of those supporting Geert Wilders’s far-right party, the PVV, were once Labour Party voters. Moreover, he says, they come from the very neighborhoods that families like his own moved into in the 1980s. Like the East Enders who left London for Essex in the 1980s and 1990s and became the backbone of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in outer London and contributed to the impressively strong showing for the “Leave” camp during the Brexit referendum, those who left the eastern and western fringes of Amsterdam and moved to outlying areas that are now strongly pro-Party for Freedom (known in Dutch as Partij Voor de Vrijheid, or PVV) feel something has been taken from them and that the neighborhoods they once called home are no longer recognizable. “They moved on without moving on,” says Marcouch. For those who stayed behind, the feeling was “this is not my neighborhood anymore. I can’t recognize my neighborhood. I can’t talk with my neighbours. Their foods smell.”34