Meanwhile, the wave of violence that shook France has spilled beyond its borders, reaching Germany and Belgium, Holland and Great Britain. These days it is difficult to find a European country where they have not tried to answer the question: “Is this possible here, and if so, how to avoid it?”
Many media outlets and representatives of political elites warn of the Islamic danger, demand an end to immigration from third-world countries, and seek a solution in strengthening police measures and tightening laws. Only Scandinavia seems, against this background, an island of calm. Judging by the responses of Scandinavian leaders to the French events, they decided to follow the precept of Leo Tolstoy, who once remarked about Leonid Andreev’s “horror stories”: “He scares, but I am not afraid.”
In this respect, the reaction of Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson is characteristic; he expressed indignation at the actions of the French authorities: “They chose a confrontation that is difficult to turn into dialogue... The state of emergency looks like an excessively dramatic measure, the likes of which I have not seen in Europe over the past 30-40 years.” In the prime minister’s opinion, the causes of the unrest are exclusively social in nature and are linked to unemployment among immigrants and the authorities’ failed integration policy.
Experts speaking in the Scandinavian media assure the public that “one should not look for the hand of Al-Qaeda in the French riots. The blame lies with the French authorities’ too literal adherence to the precepts of the revolution that proclaimed ‘liberty, equality and fraternity.’ It was the failed implementation of the program of ‘equality’ that led the republic into a dead end.”
The Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, in an article titled “When Integration Failed,” analyzes the causes of the unrest in France and concludes that Paris for decades tried to assimilate rather than integrate immigrants. This tactic worked successfully with ethnic groups close to the French in cultural and religious terms. For example, hundreds of thousands of Italians and Poles who moved to the country in the postwar years successfully dissolved into French society, but the trick did not work with people from North African and Middle Eastern states. “France has always been considered a European leader in implementing a model based on ‘equality,’” Jan-Paul Brekke, a researcher at the Institute of Social Research, writes in Dagbladet. “Obtaining French citizenship was easy and simple compared to other European states. At the same time, the authorities did not encourage ethnic and cultural diversity in society. The goal was to assimilate immigrants as quickly as possible, and the school played a central role in this. The concept of ‘cultural minority,’ important for a welfare society, was forgotten.”
Many experts who have spoken on the pages of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish newspapers share this opinion. In their view, it was precisely the discrepancy between the image of “equal Frenchmen” without any cultural or ethnic differences inculcated by the school, and real life, that led rioters to set fire to schools and gymnasiums. Indeed, in practice it turned out that a black Frenchman, as soon as he left the classroom, found it much harder to get a decent job or housing in a good neighborhood than his white counterpart.
If the French assimilation model has failed, then, in the opinion of Scandinavian specialists, the integration scheme used in Great Britain is also unsuccessful. For decades London relied on supporting cultural, religious and ethnic minorities, forgetting that these immigrant groups should become closer to the rest of society. As a result, the country has developed a mass of ethnic enclaves whose residents live completely isolated from the rest of the population. The unrest of the mid-1990s and the summer bombings in London proved that the path chosen by Britain, like the French one, leads to a dead end.
The Scandinavian countries use a mixed approach. Immigrants can relatively easily obtain citizenship, but at the same time the authorities do not suppress their national identity. Every student has the right to study their native language, governments generously subsidize the activities of various immigrant organizations, and attempts are made to reduce discrimination in the labor market and in the housing sphere.