Author: Roger Scruton
Publication: The Sunday Times London
Date: February 15, 2004
URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1001393,00.html
Our freedoms, built on loyalty to
a shared nationality, are under threat from incomers who don't want to
join in.
A generation ago it would have been
inconceivable that the French legislature should expressly forbid Muslim
dress in schools, or that this issue should throw the nation into crisis.
The principle of laïcité,
which removes religion from all state educational institutions, while covertly
making room for the old Catholic culture of France, had been entrenched
since Napoleonic times. State schools were in the business of producing
French citizens, and citizenship was supposed to make no reference to religion,
but only to the nation and the state of France.
A generation ago it would have been
equally inconceivable that anti-semitism should be rife in France, or that
it should display itself in the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and the
burning of synagogues. And had these crimes been committed by some immigrant
community, the police would have openly said so and would not have referred
to a national rather than an ethnic disorder, as they are now obliged to
do.
Yet those who commit these crimes
are contemptuous of their assumed nationality, and define their loyalty
in opposition to the surrounding secular culture. The new anti-semitism
is not a French phenomenon at all.
A generation ago it would have been
equally inconceivable that a distinguished French novelist should have
been put on trial for describing Islam as a stupid religion, that he should
have come close to being jailed for religious incitement and that he should
feel advised, on being acquitted, to emigrate to Ireland. Yet such is the
case of Michel Houellebecq, author of the much praised novel Atomised,
who remains one of the few public voices who will not bow to the prevailing
censorship.
The French story could be told of
the other nation states of Europe. The secular order of the nation state
is under threat. Freedom of speech is disappearing and the ordinary citizens
of European states are deeply anxious about the long-term consequences.
Nationhood was the great European
achievement, the social fact that made Enlightenment possible, and which
underpins the secular rule of law. Thanks to national loyalty it has been
possible for people to accept a common allegiance and a shared sense of
community, and put old ethnic and religious conflicts behind them.
It is not only Europeans who appreciate
this fact. Never in the history of the world have there been so many migrants.
And almost all of them are migrating from regions where nationality is
weak or non-existent, to the established nation states of the West. They
are not migrating because they have discovered some previously dormant
feeling of love or loyalty towards the nations in whose territory they
seek a home. They are migrating in search of citizenship - the relation
that arises between the state and the individual when each is fully accountable
to the other.
Citizenship consists of a web of
reciprocal rights and duties, upheld by a rule of law which stands higher
than either party. Although the state enforces the law, it enforces it
equally against itself and the citizen. The citizen has rights which the
state is duty-bound to uphold, and also duties which the state has a right
to enforce. Because these rights and duties are defined and limited by
the law, citizens have a clear conception of where their freedoms end.
Only where people define their social
membership in terms of sovereign territory, shared customs and a common
history - in other words, the nation - are they able to live in a democratic,
law-abiding order. In a nation state people can agree to differ; they can
accept being governed by those for whom they did not vote; they can agree
equal rights for all religions; they can allow their opponents to speak
their minds and influence the political process. But where religion, tribe
or family is the dominant form of social membership, despotism is also
the political norm.
That is why 70% of the world's refugees
are Muslims, fleeing from states where their religion is the official creed.
And it is why all of them are fleeing to the West.
However, while the newcomers seek
the benefits of citizenship, they do not always accept the costs. The primary
cost is the privatisation of religion and the public endorsement of the
secular rule of law. The secondary cost is tolerance, which means living
with free speech, alien manners, other religions and other tribes, Jews
included.
Democracy also means living with
strangers on terms that may be, in the short term, disadvantageous; it
means being prepared to fight battles and suffer losses on behalf of people
whom you neither know nor particularly want to know. It means appropriating
the policies that are made in your name and endorsing them as "ours", even
when you disagree with them.
Only where people have a strong
sense of national identity will they be able to accept these burdens with
a willing heart. The Muslim communities of France do not have that sense,
and continue to identify their loyalties through a religion that is profoundly
hostile to the surrounding secular culture.
This truth is so obvious that only
massive censorship prevents it from being expressed. The people of the
European nation states know full well they are being exposed to a serious
threat of social disintegration, the result of which will be to jeopardise
their legal, political and cultural inheritance.
But anybody who gives voice to this
knowledge will be silenced, as Robert Kilroy-Silk was recently silenced
by the BBC. This censorship is the first sign that national order is crumbling
in the face of religious and ethnic tribalism. But it should also be a
call to resistance. The correct response to censorship is to speak out
more loudly. The freedoms for which so many of our ancestors died are too
precious to relinquish at the behest of bigots who don't see their point.
The "we" feeling of the nation underpins
the rule of law in Europe, and is responsible for such support as our politicians
receive for their increasingly random gestures. This is as true of Britain
as it is of France. Tony Blair may or may not have been right to take us
into war in Iraq; but his ability to do so was contingent on the fact that,
in a crisis, the British generally - and the English in particular - regroup
around the old first-person plural.
Even if we go to war reluctantly,
we still go to war as "we", obeying our government, and not as subjects
ruled by some alien "them". In its attempt to persuade us to accept the
current levels of immigration, our government appeals to our traditions
of hospitality and asks us to accept the newcomers not as competitors for
our territory but as refugees to whom we owe charitable protection. In
every serious crisis the government falls back on our historic identity
and unaltered loyalty in order to persuade us to accept even the changes
that threaten those precious possessions.
This historic identity has entered
the same kind of crisis as the historic identity of France. And the response
of our elite is not to affirm national identity but to repudiate it. The
loyalty that people need in their daily lives, and which they affirm in
their unconsidered and spontaneous social actions, is constantly ridiculed
or even demonised by the dominant media.
Oikophobia - the repudiation of
home - is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But,
as George Orwell pointed out, it is a stage in which intellectuals tend
to become arrested. When Sartre and Foucault draw their picture of the
"bourgeois" mentality, the mentality of the "other" in his "otherness",
they are describing the ordinary decent Frenchman and expressing their
contempt for his national culture. When the European Union inveighs against
"racism and xenophobia" it is not referring to the Islamist movement in
France or Holland, but to those who wish to live by the inherited national
loyalties that define the political condition of Europe.
This repudiation of nationality
by the elite has been a persistent voice in European culture since the
war, and is one of the factors that have made it so difficult to discuss
immigration rationally and constructively.
Furthermore, the European Union
is actively trying to undermine the authority and identity of the nation
state. There are reasons for this, not all of them bad. Nevertheless, the
policy is doomed to disaster, since Europe is built upon the nation state
as its moral foundation. Those who really believe in Europe are sensible
of this fact, and recognise that the Enlightenment idea of citizenship,
which confers such inestimable benefits on all of us, also has a cost,
and that this cost is national loyalty.
The Need for Nations by Roger Scruton
is published by Civitas this week, £8.50
