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H-C Strache, leader of Austria's Freedom Party (from Viennese Jesse Alexander's blog it ain't bunk)
A matinee idol is how the Vienna Review described Heinz-Christian Strache’s appearance on campaign posters in June last year. His Freedom Party went on to win 27% of the votes in Vienna’s October election.
Well dressed, articulate and on the rise – continental Europe’s far right leaders produce slick and sophisticated material. BBC Radio 4 has a two-parter Driving on the Right and this Tuesday’s programme (4pm) will cover Austria and Germany.
Last week the focus was further north. A Mexican, who has lived and worked in Denmark for 8 years and is married to a Dane, is finding it impossible to obtain a permanent residence permit. The new regulations have been brought in under pressure from the Danish People’s Party, who hold the balance of power in parliament. In Sweden, a member of the Sweden Democrats took the BBC reporter to a part of town with a higher proportion of Muslims, but stayed in her car – with her two Great Danes – out of a mixture of reluctance and fear.
Concern over migration to Denmark and Sweden (in particular by Muslim migrants), a perceived lack of integration and pressure on welfare benefits, and what came over as a sentimental longing for their culture to stay the same seemed to be at the heart of the populist parties’ appeal.
It wasn’t clear how these two countries welcome new arrivals nor what opportunities there are to become part of Swedish or Danish society.
The leader of the English Defence League, Stephen Lennon, was interviewed on BBC TV’s Newsnight before the EDL’s protest in Luton on 5th February. EDL protests have a history of violence – boots not suits – and their followers are not generally described as matinee idols. Jeremy Paxman’s rather sneery interview manner pointed up the class gap between the likes of Paxman and the EDL’s membership; it did little to tease out what Lennon’s underlying concerns were or why a whole raft of worries – from crime to the protection of gay and women’s rights, drugs, terrorism and prostitution – appear to be fixed only on ‘militant Islam’, rather than the usual wide and complex range of wicked issues that exercise policy makers.
The Swiss referendum on the building of minarets and niqab bans in other parts of Europe have knock-on effects in the UK, but we have yet to see much mainstreaming of far right politics: the British National Party’s seat in the European Parliament is about it. Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, may be a hero to his followers but has very little credibility as a national politician.
Heinz-Christian Strache, 2009 (Manfred Werner, Wikimedia Commons)
It is hard to imagine anyone in the UK taking seriously someone who waves a large cross at a proposed site for a new Islamic centre – but Heinz-Christian Strache has found it a vote-winner in Vienna.
So why are significant numbers of voters across Europe falling for it?
I was talking last week to someone who works ecumenically in Nordic, Baltic and other European countries. His view is that when Christians become less confident in their own faith they are more susceptible to feeling threatened by people with a more secure and informed identity. So insecure, ‘cultural’ European Christians find it difficult to accept Muslims from other parts of the world – who seem to be more confident in who they are and why they live the way they do.
If this is true, it could also be true of people of any religious or philosophical tradition – a received set of values, whether religious or not, is not as useful as a worked-through, fully-owned religious, ethical or moral position in being able to relate positively to people from a different tradition. The differences (perhaps because between two known positions they are measurable) are therefore seen to be rather small in comparison to all the commonalities, and appear less significant. If you’re not quite sure where you stand, the distance may seem that much greater and even unbridgeable. It might also prompt you to define your own identity in relation to the ‘other’, rather than in a more rounded way.
Listening to the Danish politician on the programme speak about the necessity of listening to far-right concerns and responding to them, rather than dismissing them out of hand, I hope that Newsnight’s next interview with the EDL rightly condemns the violent protests, but engages more fully with their concerns.
Euroblogger Jon Worth has written an informed reflection on the programme, Nordic politics and culture which is well worth a read.
The next programme is on Radio 4 on Tuesday 15th March at 4pm.
A flurry of press reports and comments in response to the French vote to ban the wearing of face-coverings in public:
Prospect Magazine: Why France is banning the veil
New Humanist: France moves closer to burqa ban
BBC’s Gavin Hewitt: Criminalising women behind the veil
The vote was the lead front page story for the Daily Express, which also claimed that one of their own polls showed that 99% of Britons wanted the UK to follow France’s lead and quoting the UK Independence Party.
Germany’s Stern magazine’s cover story this week is on Women in Islam.
If you read German, the paper by Annemarie Sancar at Caux is now posted on the conference’s website, and a podcast interview in French.
No, not genealogy – spare me – but identity.
Gary Younge was on BBC2′s The Review Show (the arts show that hasn’t quite found its feet since it stopped being Newsnight Review) and also on BBC Radio 4′s Start the Week (catch both on iplayer), talking about his new book, Who Are We and Should it Matter in the 21st Century? I can happily listen to Gary Younge for a long time, even if he is plugging a book.
Belgium’s election has produced a leap in support for a Flemish separatist party. I’m told language is the key symbol of difference there, with a lot more – economics, history – stacked up behind it. The language you speak defines you. Which surprises an almost monolingual Brit like myself when I know that Belgians (and most other Europeans) are pretty multilingual. Younge says of the EU, ” borders have come down, but the borders of the mind have gone up”.
How different can we be, how similar do we have to be, to live peaceably together? Over 140 languages are spoken at home by schoolchildren in my part of London. Language is not a key identifier here – it’s just one of several. But then English is the only language of government, the judiciary, science and the academy in London. Business, the media and the arts are more varied, but on the whole, no English = no participation, so there are strong reasons to acquire it, pronto.
Do we need to eat the same food? I used to take enormous care to make sure that no-one felt left out at large 
multifaith gatherings – everyone should be able to eat everything on the table. The end of the line on this one is a diet of kosher hummous and fresh fruit. At some point, exasperation took over and I adopted a smorgasbord approach – lots of different food, well labelled, so that everyone could eat happily while learning something about other people’s dietary rules and preferences.
Should we wear the same clothes? Barcelona is considering banning face-coverings in public places, such as municipal markets and town halls. At a café this morning (I’m in Vienna), I overheard three businessmen talking about the headscarves some Muslim women are wearing in Austria. One said, “It’s what Tyrolean grandmas have been wearing for centuries”. Face-covering, whether balaclavas (sometimes adopted by bank-robbers), motorcycle helmets or the niqab or burka, is different – but whether a general ban on all or some of these face-coverings in all public places is a useful thing to do is questionable. I wore a face-veil on my wedding day.
I wrote most of this last month in London but never got around to finishing it. Having just been at the Learning to Live in a Multicultural Europe gathering at Caux, I’ve been more aware than usual of our tendency to over-culturalise. A good example was given by Judith Jordaky, a project manager at TikK (taskforce for intercultural conflict resolution) based in Zurich – she talked of a difficult situation that a Swiss family of Turkish origin faced. Those responsible for their welfare worried that they couldn’t really understand what was going on ‘because they were Turkish’. With TikK’s careful listening, it transpired that mental health and employee conduct were the key issues, and neither had much, if anything, to do with ‘being Turkish’.
“Identity is an essential place to start but a very bad place to end” says Gary Younge.
The BBC’s Gavin Hewitt has touched on one or two issues that have come up at the CEJI course – how different do we want to be from each other? How similar do we want or need to be? How important is a shared language, or an agreed commitment to universal human rights?
Developments such as the upcoming vote in Switzerland on minarets and citizenship tests (UK) or training (parts of Belgium) seem to be on the rise.
One exercise in our training today involved putting togther a timeline of faith traditions/value systems and I was surprised to find something called laïcité in amongst Judaism and the Baha’i faith. Based on a strong commitment to the separation of religion and the state, it is popular in France (where it originated) and in Turkey.
Being in the company of people from Holland, Austria, Romania, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain and Belgium makes for wide-ranging conversations and a steep learning curve for me, but a fascinating one. And I like finding philosophy monthlies in the newsagents here, next to the gardening, computer and lifestyle mags.
From Our Own Correspondent: report from Ed Stourton on the international talks in Bosnia which started while we were there. Is Bosnia a protectorate? The Bosnia report is 5′ 5″ into the programme.
Moral Maze (BBC Radio 4) on Karadzic and war crimes
The war crimes trial of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has opened at the UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He faces 11 counts of genocide, including complicity in the Srebrenica massacre in which 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed. It was one of the worst acts of atrocity in Europe since the Second World War. But is what we are about to see justice or revenge – A show trial organised by the victors, with TV coverage broadcast throughout the world, and eagerly viewed, especially in the Balkans. Can there ever be any morally certain and globally acceptable definition of what constitutes a war crime or will pragmatism and real politique always get in the way?
No podcast but listen again at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nfqzl
Heart & Soul (BBC World Service) Bosnia’s War Babies
One of the many charges faced by Radovan Karadžić at The Hague is that of organising the rape of 20,000 Bosnian Muslim women. Fourteen years after the conflict, many of these women remain traumatised, cast out from their communities, rejected by their husbands and families, and often ending up stigmatised and impoverished. Some had the additional humiliation of being raped in front of their parents or small children. Yet the psychological support that so many of them urgently need is inadequate and sporadic. Some women were kept for months and raped until they conceived. Those who became pregnant either abandoned their babies or had them adopted. Some decided to keep them, a constant reminder of their shame. These children – now in their teens – are beginning to ask questions about their fathers. The mothers now face a dilemma – should they tell the truth and risk damaging their child? Or keep their terrible secret?
Listen again and find the podcast at http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/2009/03/000000_heartandsoul.shtml
And BBC Newsnight followed up with its Srebrenica report tonight – catch it now through this link:
