On a brief visit to Paris last week, I caught up with an old friend, just as she was finishing doing up her taxes. “I still can’t get half the words, let alone the jokes, on chat shows,” I said, evidently referring to my French, “but I do understand Hollande perfectly.”
“Oh, we are all beginning to understand Hollande finally,” she replied with a thin smile, “now that we’re receiving our tax bill.” Apparently, largely self-employed, she’ll have to pay three times as much this year as she did the last.
As often happens with family and friends, our conversation bounded across chasms of logic while making sense. “I’ll never vote for Le Pen. Never,” she said, referring to the leader of the far-right National Front which topped the European Parliament vote in France. “But I can understand why people do.”
What followed was a quick pen portrait of France in 2014, a country where taxes were being hiked, pensioners were in the taxman’s aim, the country let everyone in and many migrants came not to work but to shop for welfare benefits while being insulting about France itself.
“I feel it’s no longer our country,” she said.
What struck me about this conversation was not so much what was being said as much as who said it.
For what was actually said was not quite a clinical diagnosis or even entirely correct. In complaining, my friend was rolling up several matters which were unconnected (such as immigration and the obstacles other European member states put in the way of free movement of workers) and she admitted as much.
As for the claim that high immigration puts a greater strain on the welfare state, I kept to myself the results of a wide-ranging study on the subject. The claim that high immigration tends to weaken commitment to social solidarity and to put a strain on welfare budgets isn’t new.
Eight years ago, a study by Will Kymlicka and Keith Banting, compared 21 democracies – the proportion of people born outside the country and welfare spending levels were related to multicultural policies. No systemic link was found between such policies and the weakening of the welfare state.
My friend’s arguments were, at best, contentious. There are other (to my mind, more convincing) ways of diagnosing the social ills she feels. However, it was significant that she, of all people, should be making such arguments. She’s hardly narrow-minded and provincial. She’s a senior film production designer, who’s worked with international crews and directors like Stephen Spielberg and Woody Allen. She’s cosmopolitan and enjoys it.
When such a person, therefore, begins to complain about uncontrolled immigration and the failure of integration, the diagnosis acquires an aura of irrefutable factuality. It joins up with the plain speaking declaration of a European politician like Angela Merkel – mainstream and respectable – that “multi-culturalism has failed”.
In the face of such declarations, can one blame the sentiment being shared in Malta, even by people who are not palpably, viciously racist?
Is it enough for President Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca to declare, as she did this week, that Maltese ‘traditional hospitality’ should be extended to migrants?
I think not. The appeal to hospitality sounds like a diagnosis that puts the burden of integration on personal virtue and individual attitudes, not on policies. And, unless what Merkel meant by “multiculturalism has failed” is tackled head-on by our own policymakers, any appeal they make for multiculturalism in Malta will be met with scepticism even from people who are otherwise well-meaning.
There are myths about national identity and about immigration that come from the far right – and they certainly need to be dealt with. However, there are also myths about multiculturalism that come from its proponents – and which need to be dealt with squarely if cultural policies are to succeed.
One is the Maltese hospitality myth. Appealing to it is no solution.
Immigrants, with a right to be here, need to be integrated, not treated like strangers
What we have nowadays is largely a commercialised hospitality – a personal virtue of helpfulness entangled with the tourist industry.
We should stop congratulating ourselves on it because it is a pale shadow of real hospitality – like the offer of dinner and a bed to perfect strangers – that one can receive in many other societies, not least some of those where our immigrants come from.
But, more importantly, even if ours were real hospitality, it’s not a solution. Hospitality is offered to strangers. Immigrants, with a right to be here, need to be integrated, not treated like strangers.
The second pro-multicultural myth that is often peddled concerns Maltese history. Just because our history shows our population to be a ‘melting pot’ doesn’t mean necessarily that integration should be a doddle today.
In the historic past, identity, solidarity and State obligations were different. They are no guide to 21st-century challenges. Not in Malta, not in Europe.
The crisis over immigration in Europe cannot be divorced from other crises. Over the last 50 years, migration into Europe coincided with two economic crises.
First, there was the hollowing out of working class communities in the wake of the decline of manufacturing. Immigrants often moved into housing estates that were abandoned by their previous occupants. It was hardly a recipe for integration, especially since the immigrants continued for a long time to be treated as ‘guest workers’ even after it was evident that they were not temporary.
Today, even white-collar standards of living are in decline because of global economic competition, in the long term, and paying for the fiscal crisis in the short. Migrants are getting the blame for the disappearance of a way of life whose foundations have long been gone.
Analysis of European press coverage has shown that a hugely disproportionate attention is given to troublemakers, who certainly do need to feel the brunt of the law but who are not representative of the majority of people of immigrant background.
Is Merkel right? Has ‘multiculturalism’ failed? If by multiculturalism we mean what has actually been tried – in places as diverse in their policies as the Netherlands, Germany and France – then the answer is yes.
But what has actually been tried has not been real multiculturalism.
The various national policies lagged behind what researchers were saying. Their effect was always to function to separate communities into distinct ‘cultures’, mistakenly understood as having impenetrable boundaries.
The aim should have been to promote cultural dialogue as concerning shared core values that underpin human dignity and a vibrant democracy (just as social dialogue concerns a common good despite the recognition of different sectoral interests).
It should have been divorced from welfare and connected to promoting an innovative economy.
And it should have been framed in terms of enabling each one of us, not just migrants, to be a more cosmopolitan citizen of a globalised world.
As the sociologist Anthony Giddens says in his recent book on the future of Europe, Turbulent and mighty continent, multiculturalism in this sense has never been tried. Unless we begin by recognising that, we’ll end up repeating the failures of others.
ranierfsadni@europe.com