EU countries must fight radical Islamists and neo-fascist forces at home

A year to the day after Van Gogh’s murder in 2004, Francis Fukuyama wrote in a Wall Street Journal essay, “A Year of Living Dangerously”: “There is good reason for thinking ... that a critical source of contemporary radical Islamism lies not in the Middle East, but in Western Europe. In addition to [Mohammed] Bouyeri and the London bombers, the March 11 Madrid bombers and the ringleaders of the September 11 attacks such as Muhammad Atta were radicalised in Europe.” Behind the radicalism of these Arabs is a failure to assimilate them. Their passports may read British, Dutch, French, German, Spanish, but their hearts speak of another residence. How does Europe deal with a militant faith making converts by the millions that preaches that to do God’s will is to punish unto death insulters of that faith, be it a Van Gogh or a Rushdie? Europe must wake up to the threat posed by less discernible and more unpredictable entities drawn from the vast Muslim diaspora in Europe.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Prime Minister of Belgium Charles Michel recently declared that India and Belgium would work together to counter the “misuse” of religion by groups and countries for perpetrating terror acts, as they underlined the need for all nations to effectively deal with terrorism emanating from their soil or territories under their control. The explosions of Brussels have created a chink in the armour of the European Union priding itself on its passport-free travel under the Schengen agreement. Its concept of cross-border prosperity has taken a serious blow in the hands of cross-border terrorism. ISIS has recruited 25,000 fighters from about 90 nations, including France, Morocco, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United States, and Canada. They had taken control of portions of Iraq’s Anbar Province and oil-rich areas in Syria and are operating transnationally.

Even if ISIS is eventually defeated, the world must be prepared for others who will take their place. This is because the philosophy that drives groups such as Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS needs to be understood and addressed in the Islamic world. At a time when Islamic State and other jihadist groups are recruiting thousands of EU passport-holders, xenophobic cries against immigrants and refugees are raised alongside the need for stricter vigil at EU’s external borders.

Europeans are critically important security partners of the United States as almost no conceivable security task can be handled without their help, especially in and near Europe, but also well beyond it. The very thought of European military weakness is bothersome not only to NATO and to the United States but also to the Europeans themselves, an impression firmed up since the 1999 war with Serbia. It has been further evidenced as both Europe and America did not wake up to the horrors of the Syrian civil war before it spread its refugee and terrorist contagion to Europe. The realisation that defeating the Islamic State was as much important as saving a liberal Europe — not discounting the need of some restrictions on cross-border identification and tracking — dawned a bit late in the day. Robert Wainwright, the head of Europol, the EU law-enforcement agency, estimated that as many as 5,000 jihadis had returned to Europe from Syria and Iraq after fighting with, or receiving training from, ISIS forces.

Following World War II, regional multilateralism was conducive to the idea of pooling common resources and cooperation in the economic field. The European Coal and Steel Community (1951) and the Treaty of Rome (1957) as the beginning of European integration were necessary steps in the rebuilding of a war-torn Europe. With World War II as the first major catalyst for regional cooperation, it was the fall of the Berlin Wall that served as the second major catalyst and led to the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 and the coming into existence of the European Union, which was then followed by the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997), the Treaty of Nice (2003), and the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009 as the latest stage in the history of European integration. It has been carried forward by an agreement signed in 1985 in Schengen, a town in Luxembourg, that took effect in 1995 with seven members — Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain — raising Schengen countries to 26 — 22 EU members and four non-EU ones constituting Iceland and Norway (since 2001), Switzerland (since 2008) and Liechtenstein (since 2011). The scope of integration is akin to the large Indian joint family with countries as disparate as Italy, Austria, Greece, and the Nordic countries being in the loop, not to speak of the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia since the EU’s “eastward enlargement” in 2004. Member states such as Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Ireland, Romania and the UK are outside the Schengen zone. The plurality, diversity and the vast possibility to explore economic resources must not be allowed to give way to fanaticism.

The balance of powers underlying the Westphalian order collapsed with the Great War of 1914–18, which also marked the end, or the beginning of the end, of European world hegemony, which was conclusively dead by 1945. It was a system, moreover, that was powerless to quash the embryonic nationalisms that threatened it. European integration itself is presented as a threat, primarily to national identity. Various — mostly non-state — actors have mobilised a resistance against EU integration based on the security claim that integration threatens national identity. Now wedged between the looming reality of Islamism and the danger of an incipient native neo-fascism, EU is governed by an elite, the cardinal sin for many of whom are their self-destructive passivity, their softness toward tyranny, and their uncomprehending reluctance to face the tide of home-grown radicalism, the deadliest foe to disintegrate the European project. The fact that some nations have come to teeter on the edge of chaos, and that European leaders are unwilling to shake off their faith in multiculturalism and the welfare state, spending ever-increasing sums to subsidise and deepen that failure, and thus leading their nations inexorably toward economic ruin as well is cited as an example of the failure of European integration. Europe’s larger role, as that of the international community, is to wage a necessary war of ideas with radical Islamism.

The author is a teacher and social commentator