Last edited Mon Apr 5, 2021, 07:10 PM - Edit history (1)
I live in Germany, so France is just down the road. Düsseldorf to Paris is just a 50 minute flight, or a 4 hour train ride (in normal times, anyway). I go to France 30 or 35 times a year, but can't remember the last time I spent the night there. I live in a country that borders on 9 others, and I'd be an idiot if I didn't learn the languages of most of them, since I work in most of them. I switched to the Air France group, Sky team, from Lufthansa, as I got sick and tired at being treated like dirt by Lufthansa and United. So I am platinum for life with Air France, but that stems from the time when my daughters were going to school in the USA (including 2 years in Hawaii--the other side of the world for us), so the miles really piled up in those days. Now, with all the traffic from the airport (if by taxi), or the crowded commuter trains plus metro into town (if by rail from the airport) I hardly lose any time by going down there and back by train--again, in normal trains.
In my experience, and my experience with fundamentalist Muslim communities is limited (as opposed to my wife, a former German social worker), a liberal western culture and a repressive culture based on religion indeed won't mix. It doesn't matter if it's Muslim or fundamentalist Christian. If it's repressive, the youth will rebel. Period. If their youth can slip into the liberal culture and be accepted, they will. There are millions of ethnic Turks in Germany now, some of whom are the first "guest workers'" grandchildren. You can tell by their facial features (usually) and their names, but if you talk to them, they are Germans as much any others. They dress, talk, and reason like Germans. At some point, a rejection of the repression of their ancestral homeland will occur as a matter of course, depending on how cool the generation before was with it.
In reverse order to your last 2 questions--Fundamentalist cultures have NEVER accepted more liberal intrusions. They will fight tooth and nail against liberalization because the men (it always is, isn't it?) who control social mores want to keep it that way.
In the northern suburbs of Paris, there are huge communities of Muslim immigrants who thoroughly reject French culture. French cops rarely dare to go there except in heavily armed squads, and that is usually a dangerous provocation, so they usually don't. They are almost exclusively from former French colonies in Muslim areas (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, lots of etc.), and are thus usually granted French citizenship--ergo, "you can't kick us out. We're French citizens!" Some countries of Western Europe naïvely thought they could invite limitless numbers of people in from repressive cultures, and they'd gladly assimilate if you gave them enough money, and don't forget to vote for us! This turned out to completely wrong. Probably the worst examples of this are the Netherlands and Belgium. In the Netherlands, they were somewhat more successful with assimilation, but there are still many enclaves in the bigger cities that are almost Islamic islands. Belgium was the worst case. The left-leaning French-speaking minority was having difficulty maintaining its dominance over the Flemish (Dutch)-speaking majority. They invited hundreds of thousands of Moroccans to settle in Belgium, enticing them with money, material perks and de-facto immunity from prosecution for most crimes. As we have all seen, it had the opposite effect of assimilation. Violent crimes in Belgium got so frequent that the government forbade the press from saying the assaults etc. were carried out by Moroccans. The Belgians took to saying the attacks were carried out by "the Swedes." Obviously, Swedish immigrants--if indeed there are any!--are not likely to assault street car conductors or smash car windows in front of police stations in broad daylight. It became the Belgian euphemism for Moroccans. Predictably, the Flemish far right got a huge boost at the polls, as did Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, although Wilders took pains to keep his distance from the more radical rightists such as Haider in Austria and LePen in France.
Germany went the same "tolerance" route, but nowhere near as extremely as Belgium. Germany's problem was that the former east had the official party line that Nazism had totally been eliminated in their socialist paradise, and they therefore never tried to combat it. After all, what need to combat that which isn't there? Guess where far right movements in Germany now enjoy their biggest popularity? Well, well, it's in those areas of Germany that spent 40 years denying that any such people were there in the first place.
The degree of "tolerance (i.e. immunity from prosecution) " pretty much set the degree of the right wing pushback. One of the great ironies of all this is that the biggest boost to the growth of the far right was the failed policies of the far left.
It's worth noting that one of the recent (relatively, anyway) success stories has been the German absorption of a million Syrian refugees. Maybe taking a hint from their neighbors, the Merkel team went in heavy on teaching the newcomers not only German, but German ways. "If you want to stay here, OK, but you have to become one of us, because we will never become you. Accept that now or go back now." The predicted wave of a decades-long home-grown Islamic catastrophe hasn't materialized at all. Indeed, when we recently needed the phone system in our house overhauled, the technician, who we assumed was German, was a Syrian, maybe 30 years old, who spoke German so well, neither my wife nor I had even noticed he was foreign-born. We asked how long he had been in Germany. He said four years. We asked if he had studied German in Syria, and he said he didn't speak a word of German when he got here. Sure, we couldn't say for sure that he didn't beat up a sister or female cousin for dating a German or going out dancing dressed like a German, but from his language and mannerisms, it was pretty clear he knew that Germany had given him a second chance at a life, and he was absolutely not going to blow it. The wind was pretty much taken out of the sails of the German far right (AfD), when the Merkel government was smart enough to welcome the Syrians with an admonishment--you are welcome to stay, and we'll give you language and job training, but only if you intend to become German, not the Taliban. So far, that approach has had the most success of any European country, although it should be noted that Syria was already a hugely diverse country, whereas places like Algeria and Morocco were less so. Syria had a huge contingent of Arab Muslim academics, but also Kurds, Alawites, Aramaïcs, Christians, and even Assyrians (!!). The people who showed up on the leaky rafts from the Middle East were NOT all wild-eyed Muslim fanatics who couldn't wait to bomb the infidels on their home ground.
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