Islam in France: Some Interesting New Research

I thought I’d share the findings of an interesting study of French Muslims just been published here in France.

Unlike the US, where the government obsessively counts and classifies those among us who have, say, strands of Cherokee DNA, the French government is not permitted to classify people by ethnicity nor to ask census questions about race or origins. The Republic is based on the idea that all citizens are equal and free from distinctions of class, race, or religion. (After a while here, this really starts to seem like common sense. When recently I filled out a form requesting my absentee ballot, complete with the standard box to check indicating my race, it struck me how inappropriate, intrusive, and obsessive it is constantly to ask American citizens to report their own skin color.)

It’s refreshing that the French government is genuinely color-blind, or at least, that it insists upon this ideal. On the other hand, lack of data about minorities hampers the state’s ability to measure how well these minorities are doing or recognize when a group, however artificial, is having problems best addressed qua group.

Because the government doesn’t count minorities, studies like this one are the closest thing we have to detailed census data, and thus especially valuable to those of us trying to figure out just what’s really going on here amid all the mostly pointless noise. A study like this is worth far more than anecdotal reports, especially when those reports sensationalized to generate site traffic and clicks. The author, Hakim El Karoui, is a professional geographer; he worked with the polling company iFOP, and the report seems well-designed and methodologically rigorous. They began with a nationally representative sample of more than 15,000 people, from which they extracted a sub-sample of 1029 who claimed to be Muslim or to have at least one Muslim parent. If you read French, you can read the whole thing here.

It’s very interesting, and none of this will be reported in the US, I’m sure, but it’s far too long for me to translate in one post. So today I’ll translate some of the highlights, add a few thoughts of my own, and summarize the chapters that follow. If any of them interest you, let me know, and I’ll translate them for you, or summarize them, in the coming week.

The highlights:

• Self-identified Muslims constitute 5.6 percent of the metropolitan population in France. (This is far less than commonly claimed in the US media, which often says they’re 10 percent of the French population, and sometimes puts the figure as high as 15 percent. I knew those numbers were too high, but didn’t realize the real figure was this low — although it’s consistent with what I see around me. This also means that the commonly-quoted claim that France’s Muslim population is the highest in Europe is probably wrong, although I don’t know if our estimates of the number of Muslims in other European countries are much more accurate.)
• Of the sample of 1029, 15 percent say they are not Muslims, but have at least one Muslim parent — meaning this group is about 1 percent of France’s population.
• Only 7.5 percent of the respondents identify as Muslims despite having neither a Muslim father nor mother. So the exit rate from Islam is twice as high as the entry rate. (This is obviously significant: Scandalized reports that France is being “Islamized” and the French are converting to Islam at a significant rate are fantasy and invention. Muslims have much more reason to fear secularization than vice-versa.)
• More than one in two of the respondents’ parents were born in France; 24 percent were naturalized French citizens, and 26 percent were foreign nationals.
• The average age of the respondent was 35.8. (This is younger than the average French citizen, but not really young enough to be a frighteningly virile cohort that will somehow outbreed non-Muslims.)
• The respondents’ fathers mainly come from Algeria and Morocco: 31 and 20 percent, respectively. Tunisia accounts for another 8 percent, the rest of Africa a bit more than 15 percent, and Turkey about 5 percent. The respondents’ mothers exhibited a similar profile, with very little endogamy.
• People who belong to the working classes (the authors’ term) and day laborers are over-represented. Almost 25 percent are blue-collar workers, as opposed to 13.1 percent in the overall sample; and 38% are unemployed: This is twice the average French unemployment rate. (“Average” rates here are what they extrapolated from the general sample.)
• Muslims tend to be overrepresented in precarious forms of employment (fixed term, temporary, part-time). But we’re also seeing the emergence of a middle and upper class: 10 percent were in middle management and 5 percent were very highly-skilled workers. (“Highly-skilled” is my best effort at translating a term no American would use: “professions intellectuelles supérieures.” Literally: “intellectually superior professions.”)
• The community is characterized by four traits. 1. Regular religious practice: 31 percent went to a mosque or prayer room once a week, as opposed to 8.2 percent of regular churchgoers (or appropriate analogue) in the general population; 2. A marked preference for halal food: 70 percent of the respondents said they “always” buy halal meat, 22 percent bought it “sometimes” and only 6 percent said “never”; 3. The majority supports veiling, despite major divisions: 65 percent are in favor of the veil; 4. The absence of widespread Muslim communalism: 78 percent of the respondents who are registered on electoral lists said they don’t always vote for Muslim candidates.
• Interestingly, contrary to popular opinion, men are less conservative than women. Among men, 26 percent reject veiling. Only 18 percent of women agree. (The phrasing of the question: “Do you look favorably upon veiling?”) Men were also more likely to say, “Everyone should do what they want.” The authors note the difficulty of interpreting the answer to this question, given that the full face veil is illegal in France. Does the response reflect a genuine preference for veiling, they wonder, or does it represent resentment of a meddlesome state? They’re particularly perplexed, because only 23 percent of women said that they “always” wore hijab; 7 percent said they wore it except when they were at work or school; and 5 percent wore it “rarely.”

The authors of the study count three broad groups:

• The “silent majority,” comprising 46 percent of respondents. “Their value system aligns with French society, they thus contribute to the evolution of the particularities of their faith.”
• “Conservatives.” This is something of a composite group. “They make up 25 percent of the sample and are at the heart of the political and ideological battle. The proposals in our report are tools for winning this battle. Proud to be Muslims, they claim the right to express their religion in public spaces. Very pious (Sharia is of great importance to them, so long as it’s in the boundaries of the Republic’s laws), they feel positively about expressions of religion in the workplace, and have widely adopted the “halal” standard as the definition of “a real Muslim” They firmly reject the niqab and polygamy and accept secularism.”
• “Authoritarians,” who make up 28 percent. They are mostly young, low-skilled, and at the bottom of the employment hierarchies. They live in the large suburbs around the cities. This group is defined more by its use of Islam to signify revolt from the rest of French society than by its conservatism.

Here are the chapter headings. You’ll probably be able to see from them that interesting things are made possible by the French tradition of dirigisme and its lack of a free exercise clause. Let me know if you see something you’d like to learn more about; I’ll translate it for you this week.

Summary

Foreward by Hakim El Karoui

1. A PORTRAIT OF MUSLIMS IN FRANCE

1.1. Methodology

1.2. Sociological and demographic characteristics of Muslims in France

1.2.1. Demography

1.2.2. Nationality

1.2.3. Country of Origin

1.2.4. Other Characteristics

1.3. Typology of Muslims according to their Religiosity and Sociodemographic Description of Groups

1.4. Which Islamic Practices?

1.4.1. Halal and Dietary Norms

1.4.2. The Wearing of the Veil: What Motivates It?

1.4.3. Which Religious Authorities?

1.4.4. How Often Do they Visit the Mosque?

1.5. Relationship to France, its Institutions, and Society

1.5.1. Attachment

1.5.2. Defiance

1.5.3. Openness to Others and Diversity

1.5.4. Political Opinions about French Society

1.5.5. Relationship to Politics

1.6. Conclusions of the Inquiry

2. FRENCH ISLAM: ORGANZED FROM THE TOP

a. Consular Islam

i. Foreign Countries that Transmit Islam

ii. Foreign Countries that Transmit a Fundamentalist Islam

b. L’UOIF (The Union of Islamic Organizations in France): An Islam à la française?

i. Origins and Organization

ii. An Agent of French Islam

iii. Notoriety and Institutionalization: Decline or Neutralization of the UOIF?

c. Salafism: A Rampant Ideology without a Central Organizaton

i. A Modern Fundamentalism

ii. Public Targets

iii. Differences between Brotherhood Fundamentalism and Salafist Fundamentalism

d. State Efforts to Organize a French Islam

i. Pierre Joxe and the Creation of the Conseil de Réflexion sur l’Islam en France (French Deliberative Council on Islam) or CORIF (1989- 1993)

ii. The Pasqua Method, or The Algerian Choice

iii. Jean-Louis Debré, or the Laisser-faire Method

iv. Jean-Pierre Chevènement : From Istichâra to the Premises of the CFCM

v. Nicolas Sarkozy and the Birth of the CFCM

vi. Results and Perspectives from Today’s CFCM

vii. Relations between Islam and the Republic: The Methods and the Men

viii. Relations between the State and Islam in Europe: An imperfect Institutionalization

3. ISLAM FROM THE BOTTOM

a. Everyday Islam

i. Everyday Islam: The Pyramid and the Rhizome

ii. Weight and Role of the Mosques

iii. Weight and Role of the Imams

b. Islam on the Internet: The Islam of the Multitude

4. RECOMMENDATIONS

a. Proposals

i. Create The French Foundation for Islam and the Muslim Association for a French Islam: Two Major Institutions

ii. A Chief Imam of France to Express an Islamic Doctrine Compatible with Republican Values

iii. Extend the Alsace-Morelle Concordat to Islam

iv. Accelerate Arab-Language Education

v. Create and Professionalize Chaplains

vi. Facilitate the Management of Everyday Islamic Life

vii. Create a Secretary of State, named by the Prime Minister, for Religious Affairs and Secularism

viii. Develop Knowledge of Islam

ix. Optional Scenario — Studied but not Recommended by this Report: Update the Law of 1905 to take into Account New Sects

IS A FRENCH ISLAM POSSIBLE? For and Against

And please don’t forget: If you’d like to know a lot more about this, I’m writing a book about it — and funded entirely by my readers:

Update on the Attack in Nice and the Failed Turkish Coup

Gokhan Tan/Getty Images. This photo is already justifiably famous.

Editors have been writing and calling me all weekend to ask if I can comment on events in France and Turkey. Of course, this would happen be one of the very few weeks in the past decade that I’ve neither been in France nor Turkey.

But I’ve been following the news closely in both places. I wrote this piece about the attack in Nice for City Journal. It was monstrous and terribly depressing, but not surprising. I’ll be back in France tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll then be able to tell you a bit more then about the investigation and how France is reacting.

As for Turkey, to tell you much beyond what’s in the news, I’d have to be there. It’s a catastrophe, and people there will suffer for a long time because of it.

Many aspects of the story so far make no sense to me — why did the putschists bomb the Turkish Parliament, of all insane things? Why was the coup attempt so incompetently executed? That doesn’t mean there’s no explanation, only that I don’t yet understand it.

Although Vox isn’t where I’d usually go for incisive commentary, they interviewed someone to whom I would turn for that. As Dani Rodrik points out, the whole coup attempt is very puzzling:

For one thing, it seems to have been very poorly planned. For example, most TV channels were left operating and there does not seem to have been an attempt to take Erdogan in. … Second, it is not clear who would benefit from a coup. The military is no longer the secularist stronghold with a strong esprit de corps and sense of mission it once was. (Hence the widespread theory in Turkey that this was a coup staged by Erdogan himself, designed to pave the way for an Erdogan dictatorship. But this doesn’t quite ring true either, in light of Erdogan’s recent attempts to mend fences with Russia and Israel to strengthen the economy. He must know that even a failed coup would wreak havoc with the economy.)

And it’s very unclear how anyone could have imagined that bombing parliament in Ankara and blocking bridges in Istanbul would overthrow Erdoğan, not least because he wasn’t in Istanbul or Ankara. He was in Marmaris. 

The theory that Erdoğan staged this himself is insane, even if a number of my friends suspect so. Many real people have died. Were they all actors? How did he persuade so many people to sign up for a suicide mission in service of this theater? What’s pretty clear is that he’ll be the beneficiary, however; and this will give him cover to persecute any opposition remaining and pass a new constitution arrogating all power to himself. That’s an unqualified disaster.

It’s perhaps more plausible that he knew there was a faction planning a coup and chose not to disrupt their plans. But even that seems implausible — it’s a wild risk to take; how could he be so sure it would fail? But the lack of organization and inefficiency might be because they prepared for or at least entertained the idea of a coup, but somehow the preparations were discovered, forcing them to act prematurely. This is just wild speculation on my part, though.

It has already been followed by a massive purge of the judiciary and the army. The numbers change depending who’s reporting it, but they’re in the thousands and obviously go way beyond any evidence that could have been uncovered since Friday. Thousands of judges have been sacked and hundreds more arrested. Not only does this leave me wondering who will be left to judge the alleged coup-plotters, it makes me wonder whether everyday jurisprudence will now be in short supply. Who’s going to be left to adjudicate contract disputes and traffic tickets?

Erdoğan is unsurprisingly placing the blame on Fethullah Gülen; he and many in Turkey believe that we’ve been sheltering Gülen explicitly for such purposes. His demand that we extradite him has the potential to escalate quickly to a crisis. Last night a Turkish minister, Süleyman Soylu, explicitly blamed the US for the coup attempt: “The instigator of this coup is United States,” he said, and “Behind the terror in [Turkey’s] southeast, and troubles in Syria and Iraq, is the USA’s ambitions and plans.”

Last night Erdoğan announced that those who stand by Gülen would be “at war” with Turkey. As of last night, Incirlik was shut down, with much speculation that it would remain that way until Gülen was returned. I don’t know if this is true, but if it is, it will at least temporarily starve anti-ISIS forces in Syria of air support. 

Over the years I lived in Turkey, I wrote a few pieces that might be useful as background to this. Here I ask, who is Fethullah Gülen? I wrote more about the relationship between Erdogan and Gülen in Turkey’s Two Thugs.

Murat Yetkin is probably the best journalist to follow for detailed timelines and accurate English-language reporting from Turkey. See, e.g., Anatomy of a Failed Coup.

I’ll be writing a bit about this over the week and I’ll post the links here. 

Of course, I’m worried about my friends in Turkey.

Tales from the Adriatic Route

This week I’m in Puglia, the heel of Italy’s boot, a region of baroque towns, olive groves and orchards, turquoise and emerald seas and beaches, sunshine, the smell of honeysuckle, and chilled, floral white wines. The Appian Way begins in Rome and ends in Brindisi. Its terminus is still marked by a Roman column. After the Punic Wars, Brindisi became a major center of Roman naval power and maritime trade.

Like the rest of southern Italy, Puglia has been struggling economically for decades. It feels sleepy. At lunchtime, all the shops close and don’t re-open until the evening. Many Pugliesi have emigrated north or abroad. The region’s seventeenth-century towns are exquisite affairs of golden stone, decorated with riots of cherubs and strange beasts. But the areas around the ports of Bari and Brindisi are seedy, pockmarked by drug dealers and brutalist modern housing towers.

Puglia’s ports are now the gateway to Europe. In April, the EU signed a deal with Turkey to halt flows across the Aegean. This, along with the closure of the border between Greece and Macedonia, drastically curtailed migration to Greece, where arrivals have been slowed to a trickle of about 50 a day. Some 750 refugees and migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan and Western Africa, are instead arriving every day in southern Italy. Last week, Italy’s Coast Guard rescued more than 4,500 migrants from the sea in a single day. The so-called Balkan route, used by hundreds of thousands of migrants on their way to northern Europe last year, is effectively closed. It has been replaced by the Adriatic route, which brings tens of thousands more migrants from Albania, Turkey, and Greece to Puglia. Italy is now the frontline of the European refugee crisis.

When asylum-seekers arrive in Italy, they’re given documents that last for seven days. After that, they have to choose whether to make their asylum claims in Italy or attempt to migrate to another country. Those who manage to get to Italy’s northern borders with France, Switzerland, and Austria now face increased patrols and fences. Most are repelled. Their visas then expire, and they then languish outside the system. According to Doctors Without Borders, more than ten thousand refugees now live in handmade shacks or camping tents throughout Italy. They form a vast slave army of illegal work-gang laborers, held by the mafia in rural ghettos. According to the first foreigner ever to be granted witness protection in Italy, migrants who have proven unable to pay their smugglers have even been killed for their organs:

Mr Atta … said the shocking number of deaths among migrants attempting to cross the sea is what led him to confess, specifically the death of 360 due to a boat sinking in Lampedusa, though he said he was not involved in the incident.

“The deaths that we were aware of were a small part of it,” Mr Atta told police, according to local media. “In Eritrea alone there have been victims in eight out of 10 families.”

Migrant shelters have been attacked, and last week, an asylum-seeker was murdered:

A 36-year-old Nigerian asylum seeker died Wednesday after being left in an irreversible coma after being attacked with a ripped-out road-sign pole by a soccer ultra after defending his partner in the Marche coastal town of Fermo.

The asylum seeker, Emmanuel Chidi Namdi, was beaten by a 35-year-old ultra of local soccer club Fermana who had first insulted Namdi’s wife Chinyery, 24, calling her an “African monkey”, police said after arresting the so-called fan.

The couple had been at the Fermo bishop’s seminary since September after fleeing Boko Haram violence in Nigeria. A local priest, Father Vinicio Albanesi, said the attack was probably linked to four bombs recently planted outside Fermo churches that have worked with migrants.

The bombs, which caused little damage and hurt no one, were left outside the churches including the Duomo between February and May. All the churches were run by priests who are socially active in helping migrants, drug addicts and the homeless and marginalised.

This is the context that’s pushing Italy to take a hardline negotiating stance toward the UK. Although it would be rational and in everyone’s best economic interests to allow the UK to keep its access to the single market, offering access to the market without demanding the UK accept the free movement of people would be domestic political suicide for Matteo Renzi. The Five-Star movement is nipping at his heels, promising to end migration (just how they intend to do this is unclear), restructure Italy’s debt, and ditch the Euro. The movement is now leading Renzi’s party in opinion polls.

Italy is the second-most indebted state in the EU after Greece, with €2.2 trillion in debt, and its banking system is carrying €360 billion worth of bad loans. Renzi has called for a referendum, in October, on constitutional reforms designed to limit the power of the Senate. In practice, the referendum will probably prove to be a vote of confidence in his performance. If he loses, he has vowed to resign. There’s no way he can afford to be seen, before the vote, as the prime minister who allowed the UK to wriggle out of the migration burden.

I’ll be in Puglia all week. I’ll be speaking to migrants, asylum seekers, and other locals about life, death, and politics on the Adriatic route. Are there any questions you’d like me to ask? I’ll let you know what I learn.

Your contributions made this trip possible. I’m grateful, as ever, for your support and your curiosity.

Europe After Brexit

The British vote to leave the European Union has triggered a debate — or as Spiegel puts it, a raging power struggle — in the rest of Europe about the proper way to respond. The leaders of Europe are divided, first, about how uncompromising the EU should be in negotiating the terms of the British exit:

For those in favor of a strong and powerful EU, for those who always saw the UK as a bothersome obstacle in their path, the British withdrawal process can’t proceed fast enough. Plus, French President Hollande and others want to use Britain as an example to show the rest of Europe how bleak and uncomfortable life can be when one leaves the house of Europe. Hollande, of course, has good reason for his approach: The right-wing populist party Front National has threatened to follow Cameron’s example should party leader Marine Le Pen emerge victorious in next year’s presidential elections. European Commission President Juncker wants deeper EU integration. German Chancellor Merkel does not.

The even more important question is what the European Union is to become. Is the lesson of Brexit that the remaining states must pursue a closer union, or is it that they must return powers from Brussels to national governments? Both answers make sense. It’s clear that the EU as presently constituted isn’t strong enough to deal with crises of the kind Europe has faced in the past decade. It’s also clear that it’s strong enough to alienate a significant portion of Europe’s population.

For Germany, handling this deftly is a matter of national survival. Germany exports nearly half of its GDP to the rest of Europe. It must at all costs preserve the free trade area. If Britain leaves without consequences, other countries might follow suit. This will not be a disaster for Germany if the free trade area is preserved. But if tariff barriers go up — as Marine Le Pen advocates, for example — and a trade war ensues, it would be a grave threat to Germany’s prosperous and stable postwar existence.

And from this follows the big question: Without the EU as a mechanism for peacefully channeling German energy and ambition, would the postwar peace of Europe at risk? Anyone who says, “Don’t be silly, of course it wouldn’t be” should not be so confident. To say that is to confuse the state of Europe as we’ve mostly known it in our lifetimes with Europe’s natural state. As far back as we have records, Europe has been, mostly, at war. To argue that this could never again happen on the Continent is to ascribe to the theory that humanity learns from experience. Perhaps it does. Or perhaps it only learns for a few generations, and then forgets.

The psychological impact of this vote shouldn’t be underestimated. Many Ricochet members, I’ve noticed, see Brexit as a cause for celebration. For many in Europe, however, it marks the end to what they have long understood to be a project for European peace. Accounts such as this are common:

It was only as I stepped onto Bonn’s underground that I realized I hadn’t gone by bike – my thumb going into overdrive as I frantically scrolled through the latest news. Sardined into the early morning tube, I suddenly heard a little “Scheiße” over my shoulder. Turning round, a burly German in his 50s nodded at my phone. “Sorry,” he said, with an awkward smile. My eyes began to well up – not for the first time that morning, and most certainly not the last.

Working in an international newsroom comes, naturally, with its fair share of devastating news: bombings, terrorist attacks, plane crashes, natural disasters. But never have I experienced such a somber mood as on Friday. “It’s not as if someone’s died,” I later saw someone tweet. The heavy weight in the newsroom said different.

There is a good deal of sadness and fear in Europe right now. This continent doesn’t trust itself, and for good reason.

Good intentions, at least, preside on both sides of the power struggle. The goal is somehow to put a stable, peaceful, tolerant, and prosperous Europe back together again; the debate is about how to achieve this. Both camps see Brexit as a deeply disturbing warning that the EU must change; both see it as an opportunity to change it. But on one side are the protagonists of “more Europe.” They include European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Parliament President Martin Schulz. On the other are the majority of Europe’s heads of state and government, led by Angela Merkel. Drearily but predictably, Europe’s bureaucrats believe — probably earnestly — that the solution lies in giving them more power. Europe’s individual heads of state and governments think the solution lies in giving them more power.

“The next weeks will be decisive,” said French President François Hollande. “Europe must show its solidity, its solidarity, its capacity to propose initiatives for and with Europeans.”

Continental Europe’s center-left, unlike Britain, had a plan for the Brexit contingency: It drew up blueprints for a more federalist Europe with a common budget and much deeper political integration. Before the polls, Germany’s SPD wrote a position paper, called “Re-Founding Europe,” which it published immediately upon receiving news of the British vote. It’s a direct challenge to Merkel’s policies. Europe, says the paper, needs the courage to “risk something grander.” Schulz, though, like Juncker, wants to transform the Commission into a “true European government.”

Now, before you say, “Who asked Schulz?” — he and Juncker were elected, following months of campaigning on this very platform.

The Democratic Deficit: A Quick Detour

Let’s take a quick detour here. I’ve noticed that many members of Ricochet believe that the European Union is essentially undemocratic and unaccountable, and indeed, many in Europe feel the same way. It’s worth asking why so many feel this.

This charge is often made in bad faith. The EU is at least as democratic than its member states, and in the case of Britain more democratic; after all, Britain still maintains an unelected and hereditary peerage. Any basic constitutional change in the EU requires unanimous consent from all 27 member states, followed by domestic ratification in accordance with that state’s constitution. This is a more exigent threshold for constitutional change than in any other modern democracy.

Before it can be placed on the agenda, legislation in Brussels has to secure — seriatum — consensual support from national leaders in the European Council; a formal proposal from a majority of the Commission; a two-thirds majority of weighted member state votes in the Council of Ministers (in practice, a consensus); absolute majorities in the European Parliament (which is directly elected); and transposition into national law by national bureaucrats or parliament, all of whom are elected or appointed in keeping with national customs and laws. It’s in fact impossible for Brussels to legislate secretly, quickly, or in the interests of a single narrow group, which can be said of no other extant Western democracy. It makes much more sense to criticize the EU for being ineffectual than for being undemocratic. It is ineffectual because it is too democratic. The threshold of consent required for achieving anything of significance is too exigent.

Nearly every critical EU decision-maker – national leaders, national ministers, European parliamentarians, national parliamentarians – is directly elected. Any European citizen can vote his or her representative out of the European parliament. European law is then translated into domestic law by parliamentarians who, in turn, can be voted out. The only actors in the legislative process who aren’t directly elected, or directly responsible to someone who is, are the European Commissioners and their officials — and the Commission’s power has steadily declined in recent decades; except in a few regulatory areas, such as competition policy, its authority is weak, and its ex ante agenda control has been overtaken by the European Council, which is directly elected. Control over amendments and compromises has been assumed by (directly-elected) European Parliamentarians.

Hungary, 1967. The difference between the Soviet Union and the European Union should be obvious.

It is true that some decision-making bodies are insulated from direct democratic control: the European Central Bank, the European Court of Justice, competition authorities, trade negotiators, and fraud investigators. But this is true of every Western democracy. National governments customarily insulate these functions from popular pressure, too. That’s what’s meant by an “independent” judiciary and an “independent” central bank. The independence of both is vital to their legitimacy.

To liken the EU to the USSR or other totalitarian regimes is grotesque. Every member of the EU willingly signed on to the project, with many states voluntarily undertaking huge democratizing reforms to meet the accession criteria, reduce their state sectors, and strengthen their democratic institutions. Those who liken the EU to the Soviet Union either know nothing about the EU or are engaged in a denial of the Soviet Union’s crimes. The photo to the right, above, shows what happened to Hungary when students there declared they no longer wanted to be in the Soviet Union. By contrast, Hungary held a referendum on joining the EU on April 12, 2003; 83.8 percent voted in favor. Hungary’s admission was celebrated with fireworks, street parties, and the Ode to Joy. See the photo below. Even as Britain voted to leave, the Western Balkan nations were impatiently pounding on the door, eager to be let in.

Hungary joined the EU after an overwhelming majority of Hungarians voted to do so.

But if this is so, why do so many peoplefeel it’s undemocratic? Uncharitably, one could say that people think this because they’re too lazy to look up how it works. It is also because national politicians tend to blame the EU for their policy failures, so better to avoid suffering the electoral consequences. The Leave campaign, for example, blamed Britain’s housing crisis and the NHS shortfall on the EU. But these problems devolved from national policy, not from the EU, and neither problem will be rectified by withdrawing from it. Indeed, the NHS will have a critical staffing shortage without EU employees.

Likewise, many of the charges of “absurd EU over-regulation” are fantasy. Some poor bureaucrat in Brussels compiled a table of Euromyths; the list is extensive. No, it isn’t true that the EU funds African acrobats and trapeze artists. No, it’s not true that the EU has banned bendy bananas. But clearly something has given rise to the widespread sense that EU law is alien and suffocating.

The answer to the question, “Is there a democracy deficit?” is a matter of definition and fact. But no matter the definition or fact, it matters that people believe it to be so, even if it isn’t factually accurate. Politicians must attend to what people believe.

The deeper problem, I suspect, is not a democratic deficit but an insufficiency of power. The European Parliament doesn’t represent an EU State, because that state doesn’t exist. It doesn’t represent individual EU members; they have their own parliaments. So who does the EU Parliament represent? Europeans generally. Everyone and no one. Like almost everything else in the EU, the Parliament is neither national nor truly supernational, the first because its national affiliations are so diluted, the second because there is no European state to which it owes allegiance and for which it acts.

Nor does the EU Parliament have the proper powers of a democratic parliament. The Council of the European Union, which sits in the EU Parliament, is not elected by the Parliament but by member states. It’s the transitivity of voting (Citizen X votes for Hollande who votes for Schultz therefore X has effectively voted for Schultz) that results in the widespread sense that there is insufficient accountability. Parliament and the Council in turn appoint the enormous cadre of unelected civil servants and elect the members of the EU Council, which can’t on its own initiate legislation. That must be undertaken by the EU Commission, whose president is in turn selected by the EU Council and whose members are approved (not selected) by Parliament. Parliament has no true right to dismiss or even to review members of the EU executive branch.

Still more significant: Real power in the EU is held by its permanent cadre of civil servants, who make the laws and the regulations, and by shifting alliances among EU heads of state. It’s France, Germany, and Italy for the moment; but during the pile-up on Greece it was France and Germany with an assist from Spain. This is not a problem that will be solved by any nation’s withdrawal from the European Union, however. Europe has always been characterized by balance-of-power coalitions, from the Grand Alliance in the wars against Louis XIV and Louis XV and the stately quadrille to the Concert of Europe to the Triple Alliance.

How Can They Fix It?

This detour, I hope, makes the nature of the problem clearer and suggests avenues for rectifying it. Some form of pooled or shared sovereignty seems to me a necessity for Europe. No single European state can cope with such severe and transnational threats to European security on its own. Agreements for collective defense are bound to be signed anyway, whether under the EU aegis or by means of separate treaties. It makes perfect sense for Europe to have a common foreign, defense, and trade policy. The United States is overstretched and greatly resentful of the European defense burden. Leading politicians of both major American parties charge Europe with freeloading. Any responsible European defense planner must see that this has long-term implications.

What remains of the EU needs to secure its borders, maintain internal and external security, undertake a rational shared strategy to cope with inward migration, and either complete the EMU or abandon the Euro. Absent a common policy, Europe can’t possibly hope to cope these challenges and security threats. All of this is long overdue; and it’s true that without Britain to hold it back, it’s easier to imagine solutions.

All of this is ultimately for Europe to decide, not us. But the United States has a massive interest in European stability and security, and we should be involved, diplomatically, in representing this interest. That’s why it vexes me that for some reason, American conservatives seem eager to see the EU dissolved. This is not at all obviously in our interest, although it’s in our interest to see the EU reformed so that it doesn’t dissolve, or to see it replaced by another mechanism for European economic and security cooperation.Doug Sanders makes this point in the Globe and Mail:

You might think [from the rise of isolationism in US and Brexit] that barrier building and isolationism are naturally, and perhaps rationally, conservative responses – a rejection of a liberal elite’s international cosmopolitanism and an embrace of national self-security. Yet there is nothing ideologically inevitable or politically rational: It is an artifice of electoral politics, created by opportunistic politicians who could just as reasonably make the opposite case.

That was apparent in the runup to Britain’s vote on its European membership, which was triggered by a devastated economy, an angry population and a deeply divided governing party. After an ugly campaign in which the tabloid press denounced the Leave campaign as “doctrinaire Marxist socialism” and all major parties supported Remain, almost 70 per cent of British voters voted to stay in Europe. Yes, we’re talking about the 1975 referendum on whether Britain should stay in the political and trade bloc that would become the European Union. It was virtually the same referendum as last week’s, with the same arguments – except left and right were precisely reversed.

Europe’s insurgent parties, from hard left to far right, are now poised to challenge the basic tenets of the European consensus. They are broadly sceptical about the EU, resent the United States, and prefer Putin’s Russia. They want borders closed, migration low, and trade protected. Sinn Fein has called for a vote on reunifying Ireland and Northern Ireland. The Scottish National Party is poised to demand a second independence referendum. The National Front in France, the PVV in the Netherlands, the AFD in Germany, Lega Nord in Italy, and the FPO in Austria have all called for referendums in their countries. But no one would be well-served by the fracturing of Europe into mini-states run by nationalists or communists who would quickly wreck Europe’s economies.

The coming months will be critical. The relationship between the European Union and its member states can — and must — be reconsidered. Whatever the causes of the perception of a democratic deficit, it must be fixed. And the US should help. This is one of the rare times and places where skillful American diplomacy could make all the difference. Sadly, I’m not sure whether we’re apt to see this clearly.

Anyway, please contribute, and I’ll keep writing about it.

What Happens Brex’t?

Global financial panic, Sterling collapsing, and Scotland — possibly Northern Ireland, too — apt to break away. Quite a day’s work.

A striking aspect of the results is the extent to which the vote represents a victory of the old over the young. “Young voters wanted Brexit the least,” as the Mirror put it, “and will have to live with it the longest.”

The final YouGov poll before the referendum showed 72% of 18 to 24-year-olds backed a Remain vote – with just 19% backing Brexit.

Brexiters were led to victory in the referendum overnight by triumphing in Tory shires and Old Labour heartlands in Wales and the north of England.

But the Kingdom is no longer United after London, Scotland and Northern Ireland all backed Remain.

The more damaging legacy, however, could be the staggering difference in how people of different ages [voted].

The final YouGov poll before the referendum showed 72% of 18 to 24-year-olds backed a Remain vote – with just 19% backing Brexit.

Lib Dem leader Tim Farron said: “Young people voted to remain by a considerable margin, but were outvoted. They were voting for their future, yet it has been taken from them.”

I hope that the optimists are proven right and that this is the first day of a bright new future for Britain and Europe. But unless it is — and unless the gain that justifies the pain comes sooner, rather than later — Britain (or what’s left of it) will experience an unprecedented generational war. 

Adam Newman‏@NewmanDipFa  

I’m so angry. A generation given everything: Free education, golden pensions, social mobility have voted to strip my generation’s future.

Now we’ll watch Europe’s biggest divorce case since Henry VIII. This video is from Open Europe’s simulation post-Brexit negotiations. Former Chancellor Norman Lamont is playing the role of the UK:

As someone who wishes Britain and Europe well, I hope very much that Britain withdraws in an orderly way and recovers as quickly as possible, leaving behind a Europe that’s better for the experience. I hope the rest of the EU learns and benefits from crisis and failure. And if it neither learns nor survives, I hope Europe’s reversion to a gaggle of fractious, quarreling states goes better than history would indicate.

Whatever happens, I’ll report. If you make a contribution this week, it will be earmarked for a chapter of Brave New World about Brexit and its consequences. Please contribute! This story is getting more and more interesting by the day — but I’m still well away from the goal.

Tags: Brave Old World, Brexit

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