Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

■"Europe's Muslims May Be Headed Where the Marxists Went Before: 'Ideology of Contestation,'" by Craig S. Smith, New York Times, 26 December 2004, p. WK7.

This is an interesting peak-ahead article of the sort I always clip, because it suggests how the scary thing (Islam in Europe) actually works out to become the positive force for change (I know, I know, yet another example of naïve optimism!).

Here is the key section:

When Assedine Belthoub was growing up in the shantytowns outside Nanterre, France, 40 years ago, the people who came to take the young North African kids to swim in the community pool, to register them for school and give them candy and comic books, were Marxists. The French Communist Party offered a political voice for the working classes, including the growing number of North African immigrants imported to fill labor shortages after the war.

Today, Islam plays that role, especially in France, where men like Mr. Belthoub, wearing long beards and short djellabas, reach out to the poor and disillusioned in the country's working-class neighborhoods. Young Arabs and Africans here have turned to Islam with the same fervor that the idealistic youth of the 1960's turned toward Marxism.

"Now religion has become our identity," Mr. Belthoub said last week, sitting in a friend's small apartment in a largely Muslim suburb north of Paris.

The question is whether Islam in Europe will follow the same path that Communism did here, shedding its revolutionary extremism, electing mayors and legislators and assimilating itself into normal democratic political life.

Of course it will. To shrink the Gap is to grow the Core and to grow the Core is to absorb new ideas from the Gap. To absorb the former Gap of the socialist bloc was to absorb some of its ideas, institutions, and general moderating influences vis-à-vis hardcore capitalism. The same will occur with radical Islam. To gain that population's acceptance of the dominant capitalist rule-set in the Core, we will have to incorporate some of their "contestations" about what's wrong or too harsh about capitalism's current version, or rule set.

This is not convergence or the "mongrelization" of the rule set, but simply its logical expansion. Globalization is like the Borg from Star Trek in that manner: you will be assimilated, but of course, we will be changed by that process. As the Borg threatened more than once to humans: "The best of what is you will be assimilated into the larger whole."

Sound scary? Sure. Assimilation always is, but the larger process is hardly one of homogenizing the Gap, but rather one of diversifying the Core.

As the father of a "mongrel" family whose own very Irish-German Catholic rule set has been redefined by a small Chinese female who's remade our collective sense of who we are, I can tell you it ain't easy, but it sure is both rewarding and beautiful in the end.