Anders Behring Breivik might be mad, as his lawyer claims. If so, then a significant minority of Europeans share the germs of his madness.
I first heard of the Norway attacks some hours after they took place, on my way to the Hong Kong book fair on July 22. TV screens in Copenhagen and Helsinki, where I had to change flights, reported the tragedy. The details were unclear then; I was rushing to catch my flights. Oh no, I recall thinking, another crazy Islamist! I shuddered at the thought of the deaths and suffering as well as the usual rhetoric against immigrants, Muslims and multiculturalism that I could imagine sprouting in many European quarters.
By the time I reached Hong Kong on the 23rd, the details were clearer. There had been a car bomb explosion outside the executive government offices of Oslo in the afternoon, killing and critically wounding about 20 people. The second attack had occurred less than two hours later at a camp organised by the youth wing of the Norwegian Labour Party (AP) on the peaceful island of Utøya. A gunman, disguised as a policeman, had opened cold and sustained fire at the participants, killing about 70 attendees, including personal friends of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and a stepbrother of Norway's crown princess. The Norwegian Police soon arrested Breivik, a 32-year-old man, and charged him with both attacks.
Relief is not the right word in the light of such a senseless tragedy, and yet — coming from where I did — I felt something like relief at the fact that Breivik was a light-haired, light-eyed, white Norwegian nationalist who apparently considered himself a ‘Christian'. As such, I was a bit surprised — writers Junot Diaz and Ravi Shankar shared my surprise — when accusing fingers continued to be raised at immigrants and multiculturalism in the West.
Some discussion of ‘multiculturalism' and immigration, which Breivik claimed to be fighting, was necessary. It reminded me of intellectuals, including Muslim ones, who try to understand the causes of Islamist terror. And yet, there were European voices that seemed less than honest, just as there are some Muslims who sound less than honest to me.
Irony is not the right word in the face of such suffering either. And yet, what else can one feel at this demonisation of multiculturalism — no matter who the perpetrator — or the fact that just as most victims of Islamists are fellow-Muslims, most victims of Breivik were fellow-Norwegians?
Changing perceptions
Of course, multiculturalism has moved from being the panacea of the lazy politician to becoming the Devil for virulent ones all across Europe today. I never liked the first version of multiculturalism, as it appeared to be largely the result of political convenience. In the booming post-war decades when Europe needed cheap labour for reconstruction, multiculturalism was purloined from academia and repeated as a mantra by lazy politicians: It could be used to justify and manipulate cheap non-European labour as well as make over-spending European middle classes feel good about their excursions into ethnic garments and cuisine. More than that it seldom was — even in England and France.
Now, with the boom pricked and unemployment figures rising, suddenly a stripe of politicians from England to Germany and Holland have discovered that multiculturalism does not work. How convenient!
The problem is not just that multiculturalism could not work, for, it was never formulated with an honest desire to confront problems and advantages without eulogising or demonising other peoples. The problem is that this dismissal feeds into Rightist and racists assumptions about the supposed ‘ purity' of national cultures or ‘Europe'. Such assumptions are historically as untrue as the Islamist myth of religious purity and an Islamic golden age. It is such myths — not ‘multiculturalism' — that create a Breivik. ‘ Multiculturalism', however defective, was a necessary antidote to such genocidal myths of ‘purity'.
Structural faultlines
Europe's problem of subterranean xenophobia is different from that of the US: it is less individual and more structural. I admire the social welfare systems that distinguish European nations from the US, and yet this difference is at the heart of Europe's xenophobia. Given its colonial advantages of market and wealth, early insertion into industrialisation and capitalism as well as radical thinkers and movements (trade unions) on the one side and progressive conservatives and liberals on the other, European countries started moving towards social welfare states in the late 19th century and mostly achieved them around the mid-20th. This historic European compromise between Labour and Capitalists enabled European capital to move more or less freely but protected European workers, raising them effectively to the middle class in places like Scandinavia.
But it was based on a contradiction, because Capitalism is — even by liberal definition — based on the free movement of both capital and labour. And despite political rhetoric, international labour is far less free to move than global capital. In a globalising world, European states can protect the ‘social welfare' privileges of their citizens only by manipulating the exclusion of non-European workers who try to follow capital to better wages. While European wealth accrues from the relatively free movement of capital across borders, European welfares are seen as based on strong controls imposed on the movement of non-European labour.
Unspoken fears
Hence, the European right with its worries about ‘identity' and the European left with its worries about falling wages. Both basically do not want other workers — except a few who are highly educated and pay their way in after getting their home countries, like India, to subsidise their high education — from other ‘cultures' in Europe anymore. Unspoken xenophobia is the vampire that stalks the mansion of European social welfare prosperity. The US might be defective, but it has a more honest structure.
But who can really say this in Europe today without getting shouted down in certain quarters?
When the shouting starts, the shooting follows. It does not really matter if people like Breivik belong to a particular party or not; listen for the shouting, and you will know. It is not that different from the shouting by some religious Muslims or parochial Hindus that makes Muslim or Hindu youths commit crimes. This shouting is not the same as freedom of speech. True, it cannot be banned without cutting down on basic democratic freedoms, but Europeans can and should create a much stronger body of public opinion against it. Glibly blaming multiculturalism is as dishonest as it was, once, to let Hitler blame Jews and gypsies.
On my way back to Denmark, I saw the DVD of a film on Hitler on sale at Copenhagen airport. The Danish blurb on it said, “The story of how the hate of one man killed millions.” But surely, I thought, one could put it differently: “The story of how the hate in millions created a monster.”
It is easy to dismiss people like Hitler, Bin Laden and Slobodan Miloševiæ — or Breivik — as monsters. But their monstrosity is fed by the unexamined hates that all of us harbour. When an atrocity is committed in our name — whether that of nation, culture or religion — we should search for the germs of madness in our own hearts and not just in the mind of the perpetrator.
