[update by nadezhda] Several months ago, MCMasterChef shared with us a paper he wrote during his final semester at Boston University. The paper, which is an overview of the history and challenges facing Europe and European Muslim communities, has unfortunately become all too relevant to debates in the wake of the London bombings.

It seemed to me a reprise of the Chef's paper is in order. First, it's a good review of recent writings by some of the more thoughtful scholars and commentators working on the topic of Islam in Europe. The paper is also a useful corrective for some of the more sweeping claims about "Europe" -- the Chef highlights important differences among European countries, especially Britain and France, in the distinctive histories and demographics of their Muslim populations, and consequently some major differences among countries in the issues each faces. He also distinguishes among a variety of strategies European countries have adopted over the years. Finally, and especially important in light of the London bombings, the Chef doesn't restrict himself to the heated debates on the politics of immigration. He stresses the problems being presented by failure to integrate a second and third generation and the attendant radicalization of many young Muslims who are European-born citizens.

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[originally posted May 16 2005]
Clash of Identities
Integration, Islamism, and the Question of Europe’s Muslims

Historian and Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis provoked an outcry recently when he suggested in a July 2004 interview with the German paper Die Welt that Europe will become a part of the Muslim world by the end of the 21st century. Citing demographic and immigration trends, Lewis claimed that Muslims would comprise a majority of Europe’s population by 2100, resulting in its becoming “part of the Arab West or the Maghreb” (Vinocur). Lewis is not the only one making such claims: Bat Ye’or, an Egyptian-born British writer living in Switzerland, has been embraced by conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic for her coinage of the term “Eurabia” to describe the Islamization of Old Europe. A menacing fusion of two civilizations deemed hostile towards the United States, Ye’or’s Eurabia is “fundamentally anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-American, and antisemitic”, and its development ultimately entails the subordination of Europe to the status of “a cultural and political appendage of the Arab/Muslim world” (Ye’or). Many American conservatives have endorsed the idea, interpreting the tense cross-Atlantic relations of the past several years as the outgrowth of European impotence in the face of the “Islamic challenge”. Lewis echoes this analysis in his comments, suggesting that the European Union “could rename itself the community of envy”, and that European-Muslim sympathies can be explained by their mutual jealousy of American strength (Vinocur).

Not surprisingly, these comments have been provocative in Europe, where right-wing politicians and parties across the Continent have seized upon the perceived threat to their identities, advocating stricter immigration controls and other measures in an effort to limit the influence of European Muslims. The 9/11 attacks and, to an even greater extent, the Madrid bombings of March 2004 and the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh half a year later, have further polarized the debate. The presence of a cell of 9/11 operatives led by Egyptian engineering student Mohammed Atta in Hamburg, Germany, raised fears that radical jihadists were using Europe as a staging ground for their violent attacks abroad, but the Madrid bombings and the Van Gogh murder heightened those fears further by making it clear that Europe itself could be a target. Differentiating between the religion of Islam, political Islamism, and its violent jihadi offshoots is extremely difficult. The marginalized economic and social status of Europe’s Muslim population; colonial legacies of racism and communalist strategies for dealing with minority groups; and the outright resistance by many European Muslims to the process of cultural assimilation does not make dispassionate consideration of European-Muslim relations any easier.

This paper attempts to examine those relations and trace their development, from the arrival of large groups of Muslim immigrants following World War II to the spread of political Islamism through those communities in the 1970s to the current tensions born out of 9/11 and other recent attacks by terrorists proclaiming an Islamic jihad against the West. Contrary to — or perhaps partly in reaction to — Ye’or and Lewis’ assertions, political bifurcation and division, not convergence, appears to best summarize the relationship between European Muslim subcommunities and the larger societies they inhabit.

As Timothy Savage carefully admonishes, it is worth remembering that

To talk of a single Muslim community in Europe ... is misleading. Even within individual countries, ethnic diversity, sectarian differences, cleavages within communities arising from sociopolitical and generational splits, and the nonhierarchical nature of Islam itself mean that Europe’s Muslims will be more divided than united for decades to come. Like European Christians and Jews, European Muslims are not a monolithic group.

With this caveat in mind, some level of generalization must necessarily take place in order to study the experience of Muslims within the unique context of Europe. This paper focuses generally on Muslims in Western Europe (which skews the issue by omitting discussion of the historical Muslim presence in Southeastern Europe and the Balkans), and most particularly in the United Kingdom and France. Broadly speaking, their experience has been one of social marginalization. Full blame for this situation can be ascribed to neither group entirely. While the native European population’s reaction to the growing number of Muslims living next door can hardly be described as welcoming, influential theories of Islamist communalism that emphasize social and political isolation from the corrupting influence of the kuffr (infidels) have further set back the integration process. Attempts at reconciliation will require an understanding of the historical and political factors that have produced the current standoff, but the multiple layers of separation between native Europeans and their Muslim counterparts and the aggravating factor of jihadi terrorism make prospects of future rapprochement daunting.
more below the fold   more »

I guess that's the last time Bill Thomas goes on Meet the Press ... this was in my inbox today (below the jump):

{UPDATE 1-25-04} by nadezhda: Also after the jump, my response to what was a perfectly civil and innocuous query from praktike. Just in case anyone was losing sleep over what I think about Social Security and how it fits more broadly into "what should be done" in the economic and social policy arena, you can learn everything you ever wanted to know and were afraid to ask.    more »

I'm feeling like a bear of very little brain this morning. Usually I get right away the points Matt Yglesias makes. This time, however, I think we've got a leap of faith in here somewhere in his two recent posts on university education.

Matt first asked -- not all that rhetorically -- "What is college good for?" if it produces these sorts of results, quoted by Timothy Burke:

"New information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the growth rate of the income gap between those with an undergraduate degree and those with only a high school degree has come to a stop. It had been slowing for a while after dramatic growth in the 1980s and 1990s." {ed., sorry the Burke link's not working}

Not surprisingly, he got a full blast of counter responses along the lines of -- as characterized by Matt -- "shut your trap non-academic ignoramus-man, universities don't exist to serve their students, they exist to serve the cause of advancing human knowledge!"

Apparently something about the surge in the past few days of psychic vibes from the influx of gleeful Republicans to DC has made our Matt feeling a bit out-of-sorts. His response to the responders:

If you don't think your institution should take the education of 18-22 year-olds seriously as a mission, the obvious thing to do is to have your institution join the ranks of the many, many, many not-for-profit organizations that don't educate 18-22 year-olds. Perhaps more fundamental than the question about the mission of any one institution is the question of social design. If colleges don't really exist to teach undergraduates, and if they don't do a very good job of teaching undergraduates, then how much sense does it make for we, as a society, to have turned four-year colleges into the gatekeepers of the American managerial-professional elite. Maybe everyone should just go get a job when they leave high school. If, after a couple years in the workforce which let you get a little seasoning and perspective, you decide you want to be a lawyer, you could then go to law school which might have to be, say, a four year program instead of a three year one. One could imagine similar extended versions of medical school or MBA programs. And your mother wears combat boots, so there. [ed., oops, that last sentence wasn't Matt's]

Setting to one side the unusual but understandable crankiness Matt displays, I think we're in the presence of a non-sequitur. Evidence that status differentials aren't continuing to grow is evidence that a central piece of our society's meritocracy myth is at risk. Something's not working the way we expect -- the implicit promise that a university degree will produce higher status. It isn't, however, necessarily evidence that universities are failing to educate their students.

The factors producing an historical correlation between university attendance and higher status may, or may not, have something to do with whether university graduates are well-educated. Over the past decades, a basic operating assumption of the American political-economic-cultural system has been that the reason why graduates get higher paying, higher status jobs is in part due to the intellectual capital they have accumulated as part of the process of attending college. So we've assumed that the quantity/quality of the education received by an individual is a causal factor of status.

But there are other factors with potential explanatory power, having little to do with what graduates have learned at university or how well they have learned it. Off the top of my head, I'd put on the list of "factors to be investigated" some of the following: changes in the structure of the US and global economy, job content, the evolution of "knowledge workers" as a class of employees, geographic availability of jobs and personal mobility, the shift in distribution of the employed population across age cohorts (etc etc). There might be something going on in each of these areas that is contributing to the flattening of status differentials that have previously been highly correlated with college attendance. Some of these changes might force us to challenge our basic assumption that earlier status differentials correlated with college attendance were "due" to the quantity/quality of education received, that is, whether teachers did a good job of "educating" their students.

If we shift our attention to another country's educational system, it seems like it's the same as saying that the fact that the hordes of university attendees in Egypt can't find jobs - that a university education isn't delivering the return on investment these students hoped for - is because of the poor quality of the teaching faculty. That may be a bit of the puzzle, in the sense that attendance at one of the Egyptian scrums that passes for a university may not be a very good way of acquiring skills valued by the marketplace. But most analysts of the social problems reflected in the poor correlation of improved status with college attendance in Egypt would probably point to some other factors as being more powerful: primarily, the overall structure of Egypt's economy and its ability to absorb college graduates and put to use the skills they acquire at university. We could dramatically improve the quantity/quality of what is taught and what is learned and see virtually no impact on employment prospects for young Egyptian graduates -- and hence very little impact on status differentials.

Returning to the US, let's reframe the issue in the business lingo Matt trots out. Even if we accept that it is legitimate to say that a "product" the university is selling to students is to produce improved ROI for its graduates, it seems to me we are conflating that "product" with another, which the university is also selling: learning. Each "product" has quite different performance outcomes and metrics. One of the best take-aways from my lessons in the conduct of monetary policy applies equally in the context of business strategy: a good rule-of-thumb is to avoid using the same "tool" to try to achieve simultaneously multiple objectives. Otherwise, performance metrics, performance incentives, and strategic choices are going to get mighty muddled.

None of my remarks should be taken as a defense of American universities. Matt raises core problems that need fixing, they just need fixing for reasons other than those Matt poses. And since policy answers we propose usually have a good deal to do with the way we pose the questions we think need solving, this isn't simply a theoretical nicety.

For example, on the question of the quality of teaching. Should universities specialize more than they already do -- some emphasizing teaching while others emphasizing research? There's already a basic product differentiation along those lines as between the liberal arts colleges and the universities with the huge graduate schools. Should that bifurcation be more explicit? Are there faculty incentives -- such as the growing specialization and professionalization of the humanities and social sciences -- that are undermining the priority they have traditionally given to teaching even in the liberal arts settings? What do we mean by "educated" graduates if the instrumental link between a degree and a higher salary is eroding? How does all of this relate to the growing phenomenon of life-time education through both formal and informal institutions, with the informal knowledge-sharing and learning functions internet increasing its "marketshare"?

The question of what is taught and how well it's taught in our colleges and universities is vitally important and should receive a great deal more attention -- it's just a different question than the one Matt has actually posed.

Mark Schmitt has a wonderful post that has an interesting set of comments (including from prak and Billmon). Although not explictly such, the post can be seen part of a related series The Decembrist has been publishing about how Democrats think and communicate policy.

The most recent installment is on the phenomenon of Democratic consultants and politicos of all ilks who are eagerly embracing the advice found in George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives.

You can get an idea of Mark's take on the Lakoff-phenomenon from the title of his Decembrist post: No Guru, No Method, No "DaVinci Code." Yet this post is as much a defense of Lakoff as a take-down. He puts primary blame for the epidemic of silliness on the people doing the embracing, rather on Lakoff himself.

My comment at The Decembrist was sufficiently lengthy and "standalone" that I republish it here [minor edits made only for readability]. I'm rather pleased with the title I've given these remarks, even if I do says so myself.

---

My favorite Lakoff -- and where I think the best nuggets of insight are found -- are where he doesn't try to apply his cognitive approach to politics per se.

I'd reach even further back in time than Mark -- to the seminal Metaphors We Live By. It was one of the core applications of related ideas in Berger & Luckmann's equally seminal The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.

Lakoff's and Mark Johnson's "metaphors" were an epiphany. By now, the perspective they presented has been thoroughly incorporated into how Americans see things in their information marketplace, even if some of us aren't totally "fluent" yet in metaphors, narratives and frames. Certainly this stuff is mothers milk today for the successful marketing and advertising hacks Billmon's talking about, whether they work in the political sphere or are just flogging commercial products.

The research program of Lakoff and his co-authors over the past few decades, or of cognitionists (somebody help me out, what's the right term?) who are heavily influenced by his core ideas, is similarly rich with ways of understanding how the process of talking about what we think has such a reciprocal effect with the way we think, and even what we think/believe. Those concepts have endless application to politics.

The giant Lakoff-hug happening now just illustrates that we always need somebody to be the popularizer of these sorts of ideas. Most political hacks -- Democrats or Republicans -- aren't going to trawl through the rather dense pages of current debates on such relevant issues as epistemology, heuristics and decision-making in quick-time, and how all of that is being affected by the acceleration of the unintermediated horizontal flow of information and ideas represented by the internet.

We need the Malcolm Gladwells and James Surowieckis to do that for us, as in their week-long BookClub discussion in Slate earlier this month. But even that step isn't enough. We then we need another round of popularizing -- to take the concepts and insights that have been boiled down and reframed by the Gladwells et al and then show how they apply in a particular setting. In the case at hand, the realm of domestic politcs.

This process isn't somehow unique for the fighters and their managers in the arena of political combat. It's the same for the business managers and marketing professionals who apply new insights emerging from cognitive neuroscience and its various "liberal arts" counterparts -- whether linguistics, rhetoric, neuroeconomics, etc. The business-types have one big advantage over the political-types, however. The B-schools produce first-rate popularizers of these concepts. The B-school professors do the trawling for nuggets for the managers, and do the digesting, synthesizing and finding real-world case studies to apply these ideas.

Business types and politicos have this behavior in common: thinking they've found the guru and the silver bullet when all they've found is the "flavor of the month." A favorite object of B-school studies is the company that got screwed up by management's over-eager embrace of "lessons" taken out of context from the latest business-best-seller. So the fact that practitioners of Democratic strategy and communication think they have found the recipe for gold shouldn't come as a surprise.

I certainly agree with Mark that we need people who digest insights "...like Lakoff's, and some insight from a historian like Alan Brinkley or Kevin Mattson, and some insight from an economist like, say, Edward Wolff, and a sociologist here and a journalist or three, and put them in perspective and integrate them." I also think he makes a very important point that it takes an old-fashioned cross-disciplinary "liberal arts" mentality to do that. We all pay a price for the narrowing academic professionalization/specialization of the humanities and social sciences.

I'd add that it's not just a matter of finding people with the right breadth of mind to do the digesting and thinking for the vast majority of us who aren't going to do it ourselves. I'd suggest an equally important part of the overall problem is the absence of a group of competent popularizers who can do the same thing for politics as the B-school professors do for business and marketing.

As Mark points out, it's really rather unfair to Lakoff to expect him to be intellectual innovator, applied research scientist, and popularizer all in one. Unfortunately, I think Lakoff's not applied some lessons from his own important work to himself. But he's not the first intellectual to be blinded a bit by the bright lights of the public stage.

Maybe while we're talking about expanding Democratic-oriented policy centers and think tanks we should add a "Policy Center for Epsitemology and Rhetoric" to do the popularizing?

Emily Gertz has a good post over at the essential Worldchanging.com that credits one of the world's most underappreciated plant species with saving lives. She found this article by G. Venkataramani in The Hindu:

CHENNAI, DEC. 27. "Tsunami is a rare phenomenon. Though we cannot prevent the occurrence of such natural calamities, we should certainly prepare ourselves to mitigate the impact of the natural fury on the population inhabiting the coastal ecosystems. Our anticipatory research work to preserve mangrove ecosystems as the first line of defence against devastating tidal waves on the eastern coastline has proved very relevant today.

The dense mangrove forests stood like a wall to save coastal communities living behind them," said M.S. Swaminathan, Chairman, M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Chennai.

The mangroves in Pitchavaram and Muthupet region acted like a shield and bore the brunt of the tsunami.

The impact was mitigated and lives and property of the communities inhabiting the region were saved.

"When we started the foundation 14 years ago, we initiated the anticipatory research programme — a two-pronged strategy — to meet the eventualities of sea level rise due to global warming. One is to conserve and regenerate coastal mangroves along the eastern coast of the country, and the second is transfer of salt-tolerant genes from the mangroves to selected crops grown in the coastal regions.

It is now found that wherever the mangroves have been regenerated, especially in the Orissa coast, the damage due to tsunami is minimal," he said.

I hope my fellow bloggers will forgive Gertz's somewhat gratuitous slam of the World Bank, because she's right about the overall point: mangroves are not only a great place to find tarpon and bonefish, but they're also a key line of defense against natural disasters. But she's right to complain about the problem of shrimp farming, which has devastated mangrove swamps in the developing world (and that's one of the reasons that I, as a relatively ardent "free trader," am not altogether apposed to the shrimp tariffs the Bush administration recently slapped on Vietnam). Something nadezhda and I have discussed in the past (I'm not sure if it was here or on tacitus) is the weakness of current economic valuation methods, especially with regard to ecological services. That weakness makes it hard to compare mangroves vs. shrimp farming via cost/benefit analysis, although that hasn't stopped people from trying. It's not impossible to assign dollar figures to, say, the boon that mangroves naturally provide to fish stocks or the value of firewood to nearby villagers (relevant only for some kinds of mangroves), but it's definitely shaky. But how on earth do you put a value on "tsunami protection?" The inherent actuarial difficulty gives the shrimp farmers an unfair advantage.

Learn more about mangroves here.

UPDATE: If you don't want to save your mangroves or get frustrated with the difficulty of proper economic valuation, you could just build a giant wall.

MoJo wunderkind Brad Plumer wants to know why the Chicken Little Republicans have invented a crisis about a program that is healthy and successful. Is it solely in order to force American taxpayers to assume more risk?

Meanwhile, Brad's competitor Sam Rosenfeld over at the archrival TAPPED watched Bush's rare press conference today:

The president got a tad petulant when fielding questions on Social Security. His emphatic response to any and all queries about his position on the subject was an indignant, righteous refusal to answer: “You’re not going to get me to negotiate with myself,” he repeatedly told the perplexed reporters. “I know what you’re trying to get me to do. You’re trying to get me to answer ‘Why this,’ ‘why that,’ to take positions -- don’t bother to ask me.” Rather than merely dodge the questions, Bush seemed intent on staking out an explicit, principled position in favor of dodging the question.

Like I said before, if Bush is too chicken to define his position, the Democrats should define it for him.

UPDATE: Here's the transcript:   more »

[UPDATE 12-17-04 11:30PM] New time for Barnett's show is now Monday, Dec 20, at 8PM with a live call-in segment from 9:30-11PM , and then re-run. (all times EST)   more »

Grandiose attempts to describe paradigms of "world order" and make prognostications therefrom tend to suffer from the horoscope problem: their pronouncements usually contain enough banal truth in them to seem plausible, and when they go out on a limb they can either be eerily prescient or sufficiently hedged so as not to discredit the big picture analysis. And we quickly forget or discount all of the things they get specifically wrong. Still, it's worth checking in with them every once in a while just for fun.

Consider this passage from page 37 of Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, for instance:

Paradigms also generate predictions, and a crucial test of a paradigm's validity and usefulness is the extent to which the predictions derived from it turn out to be more accurate than those from alternate paradigms. A statist paradigm, for instance, leads John Mearshimer to predict that to predict that "the situation between Ukraine and Russia is ripe for the outbreak of security competition between them. Great powers that share a long and unprotected common border, like that between Russia and Ukraine, often lapse into competition driven by security fears. Russia and Ukraine might overcome this dynamic and learn to live together in harmony, but it would be unusual if they do." A civilizational approach, on the other hand, emphasizes the close cultural personal, and historical links between Russia and Ukraine and the intermingling of Russians and Ukrainians in both countries, and focuses instead on the civilizational fault line that divides Orthodox eastern Ukraine from Uniate western Ukraine, a central historical fact of long standing which, in keeping with the "realist" concept of states as unified and self-identified entities, Mearshimer totally ignores. While a statist approach highlights the possibility of a Russian-Ukrainian war, a civilizational approach minimizes that and instead highlights the possibility of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would lead one to predict might be more violent than that of Czechoslovakia but far less bloody than that of Yugoslavia. These different predictions, in turn, give rise to different policy priorities. Mearshimer's statist prediction of possible war and Russian conquest of Ukraine leads him to support Ukraine's having nuclear weapons. A civilizational approach would encourage cooperation between Russia and Ukraine, urge Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, promote substantial economic assistance and other measures to help maintain Ukrainian unity and independence, and sponsor contingency planning for the possible breakup of Ukraine.

"Aha!," you say, "old Sammy P. was right! The map on page 166 looks almost exactly like this one!"

Page 166:

The differences between eastern and western Ukraine are manifest in the attitudes of their peoples. In late 1992, for instance, one-third of the Russians in Western Ukraine as compared with only 10 percent in Kiev said they suffered from anti-Russian animosity. The east-west split was dramatically evident in the July 1994 presidential elections. The incumbent, Leonid Kravchuk, who despite working closely with Russia's leaders identified himself as a nationalist, carried the thirteen provinces of the western Ukraine with majorities ranging from up to over 90 percent. His opponent, Leonid Kuchma, who took Ukrainian speech lessons during the campaign, carried the thirteen eastern provinces by comparable majorities. Kuchma won with 52 percent of the vote. In effect, a slim majority of the Ukrainian public in 1994 confirmed Khmelnytsky's choice in 1654. The election, as one American expert observed, "reflected, even crystallized, the split between Europeanized Slavs in western Ukraine and the Russo-Slav vision of what Ukraine should be. It's not ethnic polarization so much as different cultures."

Sound familiar? This little trip down memory lane ought to be instructive for all those folks out there who want to make the current democratic drama in Ukraine into something it isn't.

Now, for all my fellow Virgoes out there, a prediction:

Prepare to celebrate. A family member or dear friend has plans to unveil involving a major life change, and they'll want to share their joy. There's only one thing to do: organize a party!

As for me, I'm off to watch John Edward.

Maybe it's not such a bad idea after all that the next Secretary of State is an old Kremlinoligist. November has been an active month for Russia-watching, some good news, some not so good news.

Main areas of interest in this clippings collection:

1. A second term for President Bush -- views from Moscow
2. Black Gold - Russia has more... and then some
3. The evolving structure of Russia's political economy, and the dilemma of low growth and investment outside the energy sector
4. The CIS and the Near-Abroad -- Russia's posture in its sphere of influence, and the West's responses
5. NATO -- areas of collaboration and friction
6. Nuclear weapons and treaties
7. Chechnya

   more »

Courtesy the Washington Post, another installment in the saga of the shift in the balance of economic risk away from capital and toward labor. This time brought to us by the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation.

A significant portion of the skyrocketing deficits is due to declared or likely-to-be bankruptcies in the airlines and steel industries. Deregulation of airlines may have expanded services and reduced the price of flying for us as consumers, but it looks like we may be picking up some of the tab as taxpayers.

Oh, and perhaps we should consider this little item when we're figuring out how to fund the transition cost of privatizing part of Social Security. Although it must be admitted, $20+ billion is easy to overlook when you're talking in fractions of a trillion.

Struggling under a cascade of bankruptcy filings in the airline and steel industries, the government's pension insurance agency said yesterday that its deficit has more than doubled in the past year -- to $23.3 billion.

The figure is so large that an overhaul of the way traditional pensions are funded and insured has become essential, several experts said. Pensions of about 44 million workers and retirees are insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.
[...]
"The bottom line seems to be that there really is a PBGC crisis, though to date neither Congress nor the [Bush] administration has been treating it as such," said Dallas L. Salisbury, who heads the Employer Benefit Research Institute in the District.

There are three basic ways that the deficit can be made up: (1) revaluation of assets through a bull market (combined with some "aggressive" portfolio management); (2) increasing revenues through larger premium payments from employers; and (3) taxpayers making up the difference.

Door Number 1 isn't what you'd want to bet the farm on, as hopefully someone learned in 2000.   more »