Samizdata

Well, when he is not a fascist… Daniel Antal, a Hungarian economist currently visiting London, takes the view that David Carr was wrong to tar Dutchman Pim Fortuyn with the same brush as the neo-fascist Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen

I have to disagree with some of David Carr‘s analysis in What say ye, Fukuyama? regarding the extreme nationalist ‘right-wing’ successes in Europe recently. I do not think Jean-Marie Le Pen is comparable with Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands or the Schiller Partei in the German local elections in the Bundeslander. I think these parties have challenged a profoundly decadent strain of European cultural relativism. I have not completely read through through Schiller’s or Fortuyn’s manifestos yet, but my first impression is that Dutchman Pim Fortuyn is the first populist leader who started a strong movement to defend the current level of liberties and democratic institutions rather than being behind some atavistic fascist movement.

Fortuyn is not racist: he discriminates on the issue of Dutch language skills as a measure of cultural integration. The Muslim immigrants refuse to learn Dutch and are thus seen as being ‘unavailable for democratic dialogue’. Fortuyn says that he wishes a new anti-discrimination paragraph in the Dutch constitution because he wants to criticize the Islamic immigrants who refuse to accept western norms of human rights. He says that inciting violence against these groups should be banned, but not merely criticizing them. He is a sociology professor and proud to be gay, and he says he is quite thankful for the Dutch Liberal democracy for the fact that he need not hide away all his life because of his sexual orientation. He accuses the non-Dutch speaking immigrants of hatred towards homosexuals, extreme oppression of women, sexism and such things, thus he should not be lumped in with the ‘far right’ like Le Pen.

The shocked left-wing, whose ‘multi-cultural’ agenda is facing its strongest challenge in the last three decades, accuses Fortuyn of discrimination when he says things like: “Islam is a backward religion, whose followers see us Westerners as an inferior race.” And he questions the first article of the Dutch constitution, which bans discrimination. “If it means that people are no longer allowed to make discriminatory remarks, I’d say this is not good. Let people say what they want. However, there is another important line to be drawn: one should never incite violence.” In short, Fortuyn is advocating an approach not unlike the US First Amendment.

Also not indicative of neo-fascist views is Fortuyn’s anti-militarism: he wants to have a Dutch navy only, but no army or airforce. He wants a smaller government, a cause close to the heart of any libertarian. He wants to change the Dutch election system, in which currently people vote for party lists and thus the political elite never changes and there is no personal responsibility in the system. This is a far from undemocratic or unreasonable aim. Fortuyn attacks segregation in the cities, denouncing it as ‘city apartheid’. However, he gives a ‘right wing’ answer to the problem: Dutch education without cultural relativism. He says that refugee welfare benefits should be contingent on Dutch schooling: only those should receive Dutch education, learn the Dutch language and some aspects of the achievements of the broader Dutch culture will qualify for welfare benefits. This is not exclusion: this is a new and ‘politically incorrect’ way of rejecting the exclusion of ghettoization.

I do not want to praise Fortuyn too much before knowing more about his manifesto. But I believe that people who are proud of their liberties and the culture from which they sprang should listen to him carefully. Analyse the left wing media with caution and bemused skepticism: they are not beyond outright lying when a populist politician like Fortuyn seems to be not just challenging the unquestioned world view of the left from an unexpected direction but doing it successfully.

Daniel Antal (London/Budapest)

Jean-Marie Le Pen is not President of France and is unlikely to become President of France but I don’t think that it is an exaggeration to say that his success in the first round of the presidential elections is already sending shockwaves across Europe and maybe the wider world.

Why? Anyone who has been following events in Europe over recent months cannot help but have noticed Nationalist politicians of the Le Pen variety notching up stunning electoral success all over the continent, including Holland, Denmark, Austria and Italy. The success of Le Pen, in this context, is not so much an eruption as part of an ongoing pattern. Something is radically changing in Europe and the ruling jacobin elites have no idea how to respond much less stop it. They are worried. They are right to be.

The settlement of post-war Europe was a centrist consensus built around an all-encompassing welfare state where high taxes and generous benefits were seen as a type of ‘enlightened’ self-interest; people happily paid into the system to help their less fortunate neighbours and friends in the sure and certain knowledge that the system would care equally well for them as and when the time came. But, whatever we say about the inquities of tribalism, the fact appears that those same people were less enthusiatic about providing such bounty to strangers from faraway lands with whom they felt no affinity or kinship. Is this an admission of racism? Well, yes, it most certainly is. Why try to invent anaesthetising euphamisms for it?

The massive third world immigration into Europe in the last twenty years or so has seen the system stretched to breaking point resulting in a surly, resentful and thoroughly balkanised polity that is starting to express itself through people like Le Pen in France and Pym Forytun in Holland. The ossified Eurocrats are starting to reap what they have so blithely sewn.

But it isn’t just the Napoleonic welfare-state which is to blame. The post-war political class was shot through with post-colonial guilt and haunted by the horrors of Nazi Germany to the extent where they saw ‘European culture’ as something which had to be curbed, repressed and, preferably, phased out. Europeans were required to demonstrate open-ended ‘tolerance’ while immigrant communities were required to do quite the opposite. It was an appallingly misconceived and damaging bit of social engineering that may yet have terrible reprecussions.

There are those who will point to 9/11 as a turning point but that would not be entirely true. These tensions have been fomenting in Europe for years. What may be true is that both 9/11 and the Israel-Palestinian conflict have further radicalised the large Muslim minorities in much of Europe, particularly in France and Holland. How many Europeans have visualised, rightly or wrongly, homicide bombers devastating the pavement cafes of Paris or Amsterdam and shuddered? Failing to find comfort in their mealy-mouthed and morally relative incumbents, have they turned to other sources for their salvation?

Of course, this could all just be a protest vote rather than a long-term trend but the former sometimes has a knack of of morphing into the latter even if nobody meant it to. I have a sense that the world is shifting in tectonic ways and moving the plates of history around under our feet.