[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.
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I realize I'm about nine years too late to this argument by now, but I finally got around to reading Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations during the course of my paper on him for my "Ideas in American Foreign Policy" course, which has been one of many things keeping me preoccupied lately. Anyone who's interested can find the final draft after the break — it's a little book-reportish at points, and my conclusion was a little muddled since I'm still not sure what I ultimately think of Huntington's arguments, but maybe some will find it interesting.   more »

I'm taking a break from hacking away at my Uyghur paper in order to cut it down to the six pages max requested by the New America Foundation for its application writing sample — a painful task if there ever was one, considering the original version runs in at 26 in full — in order to note the release of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. Many of its findings confirm the continuation of policies previously detailed in my paper; not too suprisingly, the situation is not good for Xinjiang's Uyghurs.   more »

Well, I sure don't, obviously. But if anyone does and can translate this article for me, I would be extremely grateful. Babelfish gives me the gist, but I'm looking for something a little more precise (and less stilted that what translation bots give me), since I'm looking to use it in a paper. Your help will be duly cited and greatly appreciated.

Danke!

I'm sick with a sinus headache and busy with school and Habitat, and so don't have much time or energy for blogging at the moment. I will note, however, that not only is The Gates not saffron, it has also pretty much been done before.

So in addition to keeping up with readings in class and around the web, attempting to manage my campus Habitat chapter's activities, personally planning and leading a trip of 20 people down to Florida for spring break as a part of those duties, and oh yeah, trying to figure out what I'm doing with my life when BU boots me out of here with a wave and a dorky hat to remember it all by (I've got an interview with the JET program within the month and am going to be dashing off applications to the CSIS and State in short order), at some point this semester I'm going to need to write some papers.

I expect the big one is going to be a term paper for my current course with Professor Haqqani, Islamic Political Movements, and I think I have the glimmerings of a topic after reading and hearing more and more about it recently — namely, the experience of Muslims in Europe, how their integration (or lack thereof) has shaped their views of the West and their sympathies towards Islamist politics or, at the extreme, jihad.

You can check out some potential sources on the subject I've accumulated so far just through daily browsings here. I have a tendency to read a lot more than I actually write on, at least till I've gathered up a large enough body that I can sit down and synthesize it in one big go (which makes me a pretty bad blogger, I guess), but if nothing else that might give you an idea of some of my sources at the start going into this.

Europe is obviously a pretty big place, and not an area I've studied in any particular detail prior to this, so I'm not sure yet how I'm going to restrain myself from sprawling all over the place, but since the focus of this class is generally geared towards the progression of ideas and the sort of philosophical underpinnings, I will probably be approaching it from that general angle.

Of course I've got to top myself from last semester, so I full well expect the thing to be huge, meaning the time to start is now. If anybody has any particular suggestions for more reading on the subject, feel free to drop them here; for starters I'm going to try and plow through (or at least skim) Petter Nesser's Jihad in Europe dissertation for the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, and then dig through the Frontline supplementary resources for their recent program on the subject, which I thought offered an interesting introduction to the issue but which I'd like to pursue deeper.

Ideally, I'll be able to make more use of primary source material then in my Uyghur paper, since many of these groups have websites than anyone can browse through. We'll see how it goes.

Also, at some point I have to write a biography on an influential thinker in American foreign policy — I'm thinking Samuel Huntington, just because I'd enjoy verbally smacking him around for a couple thousand words' length — and something on "an issue relating to homeland security or intelligence"... yeah, I'm hoping for more clarification on that soon.

I also really want to write something tying together several threads that've been twisting around in my head on the notion of full spectrum warfare as a reshaping of traditional American warfighting doctrines, but I am afraid I won't have the time to devote myself to that particular endeavor for quite a while. We'll see.

From ArmsControlWonk comes news of an interesting-sounding new book entitled Code Names:

The war on terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to a secrecy explosion. In the 9/11 world the U.S. military and intelligence organizations have created secret plans, programs, and operations at a frenzied pace, each with their own code name. In a perfect world, all of this secrecy would be to protect legitimate secrets from prying foreign eyes. But in researching Code Names, defense analyst William M. Arkin learned that while most genuine secrets remain secret, other activities labeled as secret are either questionable or remain perfectly in the open. The sheer volume and complexity of these operations ensures that the most politically important remain unreported by the press and shielded from the scrutiny of the American electorate. Despite the intelligence failures of 9/11 and the questionable assumptions that led to the war in Iraq and govern the war on terrorism, the U.S. government argues for massive amounts of funding and resources, while at the same time claiming that public accountability would compromise their missions. Arkin didn’t accept this argument during the Cold War – when he published two books that revealed U.S. nuclear “secrets” and led directly to a healthier public discussion of a “nuclear warfighting” emerging in the Reagan era – and he is challenging it again today.

From “Able Ally” to “Zodiac Beauchamp,” this book identifies more than 3,000 code names and details the plans and missions for which they stand.

Regular readers of the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News may already be familiar with issues of overclassification in American government, but in my first Homeland Security class on Tuesday, I got a bit of a first-hand account of it from my professor, who was a former Air Force intelligence and CIA officer for many years. Part of your training as an officer involves learning the process of classification, and not suprisingly in the CIA's secrecy culture (where even widely known information like the intelligence budget is never "confirmed") it is an extremely easy thing to do: your officer sitting at a desk stamps the top and bottom of the document with "Secret", and then adds on the line the reason for classification, which comes from a list of various coded categories. The biggest is, not suprisingly, the catch-all in-the-name-of-national security category, although he said that a newly popular one these days was "Sensitive But Unclassified" — information which people have been actually prosecuted for distributing, even though it is not technically "secret". And as for at what future date the classification of material can be later reevaluated, "ImpDet" — Impossible to Determine — is literally built into the stamps they use.

This is all on the first day, so I only have broad anecdotes to share right now, but I think it's going to be an interesting class. (P.S. to Nadezhda - Can you add new categories for my four new courses this semester? Thanks!)

Tomorrow is the first day of my last semester as an International Relations student at Boston University. My courselist as originally laid out here has since been updated; the revised version with accompanying booklists and syllabi outlines (principal required texts only so far; there are several other shorter excerpts and recommended readings for most of the classes that I've ommitted) is below.

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Thomas Ricks in today's Washington Post has a very interesting story about Rumsfeld's latest efforts to shake up the military establishment. His target: Civil Affairs.

The Army is engaged in a bureaucratic brawl with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over how to organize troops for "nation-building," a growing problem for the military as it settles in for lengthy occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan and possibly other countries.

Rumsfeld wants to shift thousands of civil affairs troops from the Special Operations Command to the regular Army on the theory that the service needs to do better at security and stabilization. This comes as he is pushing other components of the elite Special Operations Command -- such as Navy SEALs and the Army Delta Force -- to focus on aggressive actions against terrorists and other missions.

Officers specializing in civil affairs -- which helps establish local governments in occupied areas, oversees humanitarian assistance and coordinates military activities with aid organizations -- say they oppose the move. They say many officers believe, based in part on their experience in Iraq, that regular combat commanders do not understand their work and do not know how to use them well.

I have been intending to write up a post in reaction to Dana Priest's book The Mission which I recently finished, and also tie in some of the observations made by Major Isiah Wilson in his report on civil-military planning in Iraq. That post, still only half-formed may have to wait indefinitely, with the start of classes soon (the Wilson report is about sixty pages and I don't know when I'll have a chance to sit down with it soon). Until it does materialize, this may serve in lieu of it.

Although Priest talks about the US Army's increasingly frequent service in nation-building, peacekeeping "operations other than war", she doesn't go into great detail about the structure of the military's civil affairs duties — perhaps because that role has often been assumed ad hoc by units deployed to Kosovo and elsewhere. If she mentioned that Civil Affairs was a subcommand of US Special Operations Command, I definitely missed it.

Previously I've thought that one answer to the issue of America's increasingly militarized nation-building mission — a role that, as Nadezhda (and Priest) argues, the military has traditionally been hesitant to embrace as a whole, despite admirable performances by those who serve in these missions — might be to somehow expand the concept of "joint" operations planning to include US civil institutions like State, the Justice Department (why do we train so many foreign soldiers, and so few police?), and so forth. Not having read the full Wilson report yet, I'm still not clear on just how operational war plans are made, but it's my impression that whatever influence these other non-military branches of government have on the campaign occurs more at the strategic (ie., the President and his Cabinet) level than the actual planning of the deployment and order of battle. The result is a situation where, as Wilson describes it (I have gotten this far), the armed forces defines its mission in strictly military terms and assumes that the responsibility for political, economic, and social reconstruction falls to someone else. In other words, Phase IV is somebody else's problem.

Reading this article, now I'm wondering if one good start might not be to go one better on Rumsfeld and actually make Civil Affairs Command its own independent command, with an independent institutional voice at the table alongside the regional CinC, SOCOM, and the others. As Ricks' piece notes, even though Civil Affairs is opposed to being subsumed under the regular army's command,

having civil affairs in Special Operations has never been a great fit, either. "We do not, after all, fit the mold of steely-eyed killers," [an officer] said. "We are supposed to be language and cultural experts."

No matter how much the Bush administration team may dislike it, the nation-building mission is not going away, and we will need a force structure capable of bearing that load. I think the dangers we face in Iraq today show some of the costs of going into "post-modern war" (to borrow Wilson's phrase) without adequate preparation for that Phase IV post-combat mission. Perhaps State under Condi Rice will develop into a strong voice for taking on that role, but I doubt it. Like it or not, given how much State has withered as an instrument of American policy when compared with our military forces, I think there has to be some effort to strengthen the standing of those soldiers devoted to the study of "operations other than war" within the US military if we're to see effects. In this, rather than going too far, I think Rumsfeld may not even be going far enough.

Edit - See also a parallel discussion at Tacitus, a somewhat related proposal on the subject of military reorganization at Belgravia Dispatch, and the Barnett briefing in comments.

Just got back from a two-day visit up to friends at Earlham College, a small Quaker college about the size of my freshman year dorm, except with a nicer campus. Now I know where people get the whole "liberal academia" thing. Tomorrow I fly back to Boston for the start of classes Tuesday, and besides ordering books and running some other start-of-the-semester errands over the long weekend, the return to a high-speed university ethernet connection means I can now watch this.