Fortress Europe and the Far Right

According to John Henley, Guardian Europe correspondent, there is mounting concern across Europe that the EU’s much vaunted asylum and migration pack is under threat as governments under ‘intense political pressure from far-right parties’ compete to introduce tough new anti-immigration measures. Whether this is a matter for concern is questionable, to say the least, yet the article is valuable because it reveals the parallel universe inhabited by the post-Marxist bourgeois liberal elite.

Marcus Engler, of the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research, we hear, objects that the new restrictions are ‘clearly driven by electoral logic’ as the influence of ‘far-right’ governments and parties reaches ‘a critical point’. But it seems to have escaped him that democracy might entail implementing the will of the people.

In Germany, writes Henley, the socialist-led coalition government’s volte face on migration in response to a series of knife attacks by asylum seekers, and the gathering electoral threat of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), ‘has been widely denounced as politically motivated’. Yet it is apparently beyond his comprehension that people would draw a natural link between knife attacks by asylum seekers and migration. Surely migrants are as entitled as the rest of the population to go out and knife people. It is their human right.

Even ‘once-welcoming’ Sweden has succumbed under the pressure of the ‘far-right’ Sweden Democrats, and now pays migrants to return home. Yet Henley passes over the most likely explanatory factor: that urban areas of once-peaceful Sweden have been turned into no-go zones riven by immigrant drug gangs, women are scared to go out at night, violent crime is endemic, and parts of Malmo now form parallel societies.

France’s new right-wing government includes Bruno Retailleau, the ‘hardline’ interior minister, who has declared that the French people ‘want more order: order in the streets, order at the borders’. We are supposed to recoil at this. Yet Henley makes no mention of the brutal murder last week of a 19-year-old student perpetrated in Paris by a Moroccan migrant under order of deportation for a previous rape – an event that has convulsed France. Nor does he mention that far-left students are disrupting tributes led by fellow students because they judge them to be instrumentalising the murder and demonising migrants. After all, anyone could have committed the crime. The possibility that migrants might issue from cultures whose attitudes towards women make it difficult for them to integrate into secular Western societies is a subject that is, of course, taboo.

As for the unspeakable Hungary, its government is simply ‘nativist’.

Most revealing of all is Engler’s concern that the idea of the EU as ‘a space of free movement and human rights’, the work of a generation of enlightened politicians and officials, stands to be torn down. For bourgeois liberals, Europe has no indigenous peoples or cultures, or at least none worth preserving. There is no such thing as European civilisation – or if there is, it must urgently be deconstructed for it is the product of colonial oppression, imperialism, Eurocentrism, Christianity, white racism and white privilege. Europe is merely a space, a vacant lot, for the construction of an inclusive and diverse global community, a new utopia purged of colonial oppression and whiteness, in which minority and marginalised groups can live in harmony.

Meanwhile, the bourgeois liberal elite can bathe in the virtue of their cosmopolitan luxury values, while living conveniently apart in segregated homogenous communities, the privileged beneficiaries of our European cultural and civilisational inheritance, enjoying the benefits of cheap migrant labour, frictionless travel to their summer villas, and that sweet sense of being part of a likeminded global community, an international jet set, who manage the global market and international capital flows in their own interest.