LESSONLESSON 3 Immigration, Terrorist Cells, and Ethnic

Quick Write

Learn About

Quick Write

Learn About

648 CHAPTER 6 Europe

QQQ

LL

LESSONLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN 33333333333333333333333333333333 Immigration, Terrorist Cells, and Ethnic Strifeaaaaaaaaaaaaa ddddddddddddd ttttttttttt ccccccccccc SSSSSSSSSSSSSSStttttttttt eeeeeeeeeeeeeeaIIIIIIIIIIIIIIImmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigggggggggggggggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaatttttttttttttttiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnn,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrooooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssssssssssssssttttttttttttttt CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelllllllllllllllllllllllllllllsssssssssssssss,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,aaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnnnddddddddddddddd EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEttttttttttttttthhhhhhhhhhhhhhhnnnnnnnnnnnnnnniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiccccccccccccccc SSSSSSSSSSSSSSStttttttttttttttrrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiifffffffffffffffeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaa

On 30 September 2005 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a dozen editorial cartoons on Islam. Most depicted the prophet

Muhammad. The idea, the newspaper said, was to contribute to the debate over criticism of Islam and self-censorship within Western media.

Danish Muslims were not happy. Some 5,000 of them marched in protest against the cartoons. Muslims traditionally regard depictions of Muhammad to be blasphemous, or sacrilegious. They claimed that their religion had been insulted. After that the matter seemed to die down somewhat.

Then in the early weeks of 2006, the controversy blew up again. A group of diplomats from Muslim countries sought to meet with the Danish prime minister to discuss the cartoons. They wanted the Danish government to force Jyllands-Posten to apologize. The prime minister refused to meet with the diplomats, saying that there was nothing to discuss. Denmark is built on a tradition of freedom of the press, he explained. He neither had nor wanted the power to limit that freedom.

Over the following weeks, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets throughout the Muslim world. An estimated 100 people died in violence connected with the protests. Protesters burned Danish fl ags, and many people announced they would boycott Danish goods. The Danish prime minister called it his country’s worst international crisis since World War II.

Was it a good idea for the Danish newspaper to publish the 12 cartoons?

• why European countries have permitted immigration

• why immigrants have had diffi culty assimilating into European societies

• the diffi culties al-Qaeda and its allies have posed for Europe

• the background of ethnic and religious strife in Northern Ireland

75162_C6L3_p648-673_AFJROTC_FINAL.indd 648 11/14/09 1:08 PM

Vocabulary

LESSON 3 ■ Immigration, Terrorist Cells, and Ethnic Strife 64966 99646464646464646464646464646499999999999999LESSON 3 ■ Immigration, Terrorist Cells, and Ethnic Strife 649

• assimilate• demographics• terrorist cell• established church

Why European Countries Have Permitted Immigration

Europeans moved to the New World partly because of overcrowding in the Old World. Now Europe has several times as many people as when it settled the New World. But the tide has turned. Since the mid-twentieth century, Europe has no longer been just a source of emigrants. Rather it has been a destination for immigrants.

The Need for Labor

Right after World War II, Europeans had a lot of rebuilding to do. The West German economy, in particular, was expanding so fast there was a labor shortage. To supply needed workers, Germany turned to Turkey. The fi rst Turkish Gastarbeiter, or “guest workers,” arrived in the early 1960s. The Berlin Wall had by then shut down most emigration from East Germany. The Turkish guest workers thus helped fi ll a gap in the West German labor force. And by leaving Turkey, they helped relieve overcrowding and unemployment there.



France and Belgium also brought in large numbers of foreign workers during this period. They came in waves. The fi rst came from Southern and Southeastern Europe: Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Turkey. Eastern Europeans—notably Poles—made up the second wave. The third wave came from former European colonial possessions—from the South Asian subcontinent, North Africa, and French-speaking West Africa.

As Western Europeans grew more affl uent and their birthrates fell, there were fewer young workers to take up the slack. They became choosier about the jobs they would take. Service jobs—cleaning, waiting tables, washing dishes—became the province of non-Europeans. Meanwhile, the Turks, in particular, made a place for themselves as skilled workers in Germany’s high-tech manufacturing industries.

The fi rst guest workers had short-term work permits. The plan was for them to return home at the end of their contracts and for others to take their places. The plan didn’t work out quite that way, however. Employers were reluctant to let workers go once they had invested time and effort to train them. And guest workers got used to life in a more liberal and affl uent society. They didn’t want to return home.


LESSON 3 ■ Immigration, Terrorist Cells, and Ethnic Strife 651

EuropeppppppppppppEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooopppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Recruitment of foreign workers came to an abrupt stop in the economic downturn of 1973. Family reunifi cation continued, though. And the guest workers began to have children. By the 1990s some 70 percent of Germany’s Turkish community was German-born.

The Turkish community increased roughly fourfold from that “immigration stop” of 1973 to 2005. Likewise, the numbers of North Africans in France grew nearly tenfold between 1957 and 2002, according to another study. Other countries have seen similar increases.

Freedom of Immigration Within the European Union

Meanwhile, the great expansion of the European Union (EU) has created new migration issues. That’s because an EU citizen may travel freely to any EU country with only a passport or even just a valid identity card. The latter is a state-issued document rather like an American driver’s license. No EU citizen can be required to have an entry or exit visa for any EU state.

If you’ve lived all your life in the United States, you may not fully appreciate what this means. And it means most in the countries formerly under communist rule. Just a generation ago many rail trips involved hours of waiting time. A train would pull off to a siding at a national border and government customs offi cials could carefully—very carefully—inspect everyone’s passport and maybe luggage as well. Within the EU, that’s no longer true.

The EU right of entry includes the right to stay in a place for up to three months. For longer stays, EU citizens must prove they will not burden the social services of the country they are visiting. In the main, though, EU citizens can travel across national frontiers unimpeded to work or study in another EU country. What’s more, an EU citizen who moves from one EU country to another acquires the right of permanent residence in the new country after fi ve years of uninterrupted legal residence.

But the 2004 expansion of the EU did bring with it some curbs on the free movement of labor. Much of “old Europe” worried that giving citizens of the new member states unfettered job access would lead to a fl ood of “Polish plumbers” and other Eastern Europeans. These workers, the reasoning went, would compete for jobs and/or drive down wages. At worst, they would swell the welfare rolls.

And so, acting as individual states, a dozen of the EU countries temporarily closed their job markets to these Eastern Europeans. An important exception was the British, who chose not to restrict their job market. As a result, economists reckon, about 1 million immigrants came to Britain after May 2004, creating something of a miniboom in the economy.



Under the treaty governing the 2004 expansion, all EU states must open their labor markets to the 2004 entrants by 2011. The treaty that brought Bulgaria and Romania into the EU in 2007 provides that all curbs on the free movement of labor from those countries must end on 31 December 2013.

The Humanitarian Aspects of Immigration

So the past few decades have forced a number of European countries to rethink their views on human migration. Countries that for years sent people abroad—Ireland, for example—have in recent years seen many of those natives return. What’s more, these nations have drawn immigrants from other countries as well.

But unlike the United States, which actively recruited immigrants to populate a vast land, European countries haven’t thought of themselves as destinations for immigrants. Well into the 1990s German offi cials would scarcely use their word for “immigration.” They would insist that Germany is not an “immigration country,” like the United States or Canada. They held that Germany has refugees and asylum-seekers, but not immigrants.

Europeans have long looked at the immigration issue through a humanitarian lens. World War II not only killed millions of Europeans—it displaced millions as well. Masses of people were on the march as borders were redrawn and governments fell. The “never again” ideal within European thinking—“never again another terrible war”—called for taking seriously the human rights issues tied to migration.

During the boom years, guest-worker programs sometimes solved more than one problem at once. Europeans got the labor they needed. And the immigrant workers got an escape from poverty and political repression into a new life.

The economic contractions of the 1970s, however, brought a halt to recruitment of guest workers. That didn’t mean an end to immigration. But governments began to look harder at people’s requests for asylum. They drew a sharper distinction between asylum-seekers and economic migrants—those who were merely seeking better economic opportunity.

A pattern has developed—when things go wrong in a land that used to be a European colony, a good many people of that former colony often turn up on the doorstep of the onetime “mother country.” Applications for asylum have risen signifi cantly since the end of the Cold War. Only 104,000 people sought asylum in Western Europe in 1984. But by 1992 the fi gure was 692,000. More recent numbers are down from that peak but still well above those of the early 1980s. Figures for 2008 showed 20,000 asylum applications per month within the EU. Asylum has become one of the main means of immigration into Europe.

fastFACTffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ttttttttttttttttttttttttssssssttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssaa FFFFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCTTTTTTTTTTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT




This is in part because the end of the Cold War “lifted the lid” on a number of small confl icts around the world. Many of these wars are fought by regular troops and paramilitaries who target civilians. Multitudes fl ee “ethnic cleansing” and seek safety in Europe. Many of these try to make their way to Europe illegally. No one knows how many people do this. In 2000 one European expert cited a “reputable estimate” of 400,000 illegal migrants smuggled into the EU each year. The problem mirrors that of the United States and illegal immigrants from Latin America.

Why Immigrants Have Had Diffi culty Assimilating Into European Societies

Immigration, whether legal or illegal, raises issues such as assimilation. People often use the word assimilate when they talk about immigrants. Referring to the immigrants, it can mean to become like one’s environment; to blend or fi t in. When assimilate refers to what a society does to its immigrants, it can mean to make (something or someone) similar, to absorb, to take in.



But assimilation has not always been easy for immigrants in Europe or the societies where they settle. Part of the problem is ordinary racism. Most Europeans are used to living in countries where almost everyone belongs to the same ethnic group, or a dominant ethnic group. But observers suggest a number of other factors at work as well:

• Europeans don’t have the same sense of themselves as living in “a nation of immigrants” as Americans do

• European governments often hesitate to engage with culturally conservative immigrant communities (such as Muslim communities that may require women to wear burqas)

• Immigrants to Europe haven’t always had a clear path to gain citizenship and otherwise take part in public life.

This lack of a path, along with other factors, can keep newcomers anchored in their immigrant communities. Some would say it keeps them “stuck.”

Immigrants once had to let go of one world to embrace another. Nowadays, though, many immigrants have one foot in each of two worlds. They rely on cell phones, the Internet, and cheap airfares to keep in touch with extended family. But these modern conveniences can also bind them to their homelands’ political and ethnic grievances. They can tie immigrants to social attitudes—say about women’s roles and rights—that are unhelpful in the modern world, as well.

Another factor at work is that Europe began to experience large-scale immigration just as the assimilation or “melting pot” ideal was giving way to the idea of “multiculturalism.” This more recent concept has made governments more hesitant to push for assimilation, not wanting to seem disrespectful of other cultures.

Still another overarching factor: Europe’s newcomers are largely Muslim. With longer historical memories than most Americans have, many Europeans have not forgotten Europe’s many confrontations with the Islamic world over the centuries. In addition, the twenty-fi rst century is a time when Islam is struggling to come to terms with the relationship between religion and the state. Muslims are wrestling with questions of the legitimacy of secular governments. This spotlights issues such as whether a French Muslim girl can wear a headscarf to a public school, or whether sharia, or Muslim religious law, should have jurisdiction over a European divorce case.

The Christian West has been through this before. You read in Lesson 1 about its years of religious confl ict. This involved not only Christians and Muslims, but also Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, and spiritual and temporal leaders within Christianity. These questions were settled eventually, mostly in favor of tolerance, pluralism, and freedom of religion. But it took centuries.

The following sections look at some of Europe’s immigrant communities.




The Persecution of the Roma in Europe

Most people refer to this ethnic group as Gypsies. That refl ects an old misconception that they came from Egypt. Their itinerant lifestyle—the way many of them continually move around—has made “gypsy” a synonym for people with no fi xed place to live.

But those who know more about them call them Roma, or Romani. These people came from India and arrived in Europe around 1300. Their language is related to Sanskrit, the Indo-European parent of modern-day Hindi and other languages of South Asia.

The Roma number about 4 million, although some estimates run higher. They’re one of the most oppressed minority groups in Europe. They’ve been persecuted one way or another since they arrived. The Nazis rounded them up and murdered them during the Holocaust, just as they did the Jews. The Germans required the Roma to wear black triangles on their clothing.

The Romas’ lifestyle often puts them at odds with governments. France, for example, requires those with “no fi xed abode”—no permanent place to live—to have certain travel documents. These sometimes require renewal every three months. These rules affect mostly Romani people, who consider the regulations discriminatory. Similarly, new legislation lets British police order Roma in their jurisdictions to “move along” from highway rest stops. Local offi cials also seek to evict Roma from what they see as illegal camps.

Much more seriously, however, hard times in Europe have led to treatment much worse than that, especially in Eastern Europe. Far-right politicians play on old stereotypes. They call the Roma petty criminals and drains on social services. Recent Roma experiences include:

• The Italian government announced plans for a national registry of all of the country’s estimated 150,000 Roma, including those born in Italy. Some observers found it especially troubling that other European leaders raised few objections to this.

• In the Czech Republic, right-wing groups have clashed with police as they tried to march through neighborhoods where the Roma have established permanent homes.

• A string of attacks on Roma in Hungary—18 in 18 months—was carried out in 2008–09. The attackers used crude fi rebombs, as well as fi rearms. The attacks were so precise and stealthy that authorities suspect that rogue police or military offi cers were behind them.



Harassment of Foreigners and Immigrants in Germany

Meanwhile, in Germany harassment of immigrants, foreigners, and people who “look foreign” remains an issue. The US State Department has called such harassment, including beatings, “a frequent problem throughout the country.”

Many of these crimes are connected to right-wing political groups. Ironically, harassment also seems to occur more often in the formerly communist east, which is poorer than the west.

Germany has been trying to attract foreign scholars and students. But Viadrina University, in the poor state of Brandenburg, has received reports of harassment and attacks on foreign students since it reopened in 1991. The state is home to a small but violent subculture based on an ideology of racial purity.

German authorities use the term “politically motivated crime” to identify offenses related to victims’ ideology, race, and so forth. In other words, these are hate crimes. With a population of 82 million, Germany has experienced about 1,000 violent politically motivated crimes annually in recent years.

The Challenges of Employment, Education, and Housing Faced by Immigrants in France

More than many of their neighbors, the French tend to see themselves as a nation that welcomes immigrants. France has long seen a relatively high level of immigration. More than 1 million North African Muslims arrived in the 1960s and early 1970s. France has the largest Muslim and Jewish populations in Europe.

This doesn’t mean, though, that immigration hasn’t been an issue. On the contrary, it’s long smoldered. In the fall of 2005 it burst into fl ames with three weeks of rioting by North African immigrants. The episode turned a spotlight on the challenges of employment, education, and housing that young immigrants, or the children of immigrants, face in France.

The trouble began on 27 October 2005 with a power failure in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. It later turned out that two young men—one from Mali, the other from Tunisia—thought the police were chasing them for an identity check. They climbed into an electric relay station and touched a high-voltage transformer. They were immediately electrocuted. The whole neighborhood was blacked out.

People blamed aggressive policing for the young men’s deaths. The immigrants’ anger touched off riots. The offi cial report said the police were not actually after the two young men who died. But routine police checks are so much a part of life for young immigrants that not everyone believed the offi cial report.




In France, poor people tend to live in the “suburbs,” not in the inner city. To Americans, “suburb” may suggest tree-lined streets and big houses. But the French term for suburb, banlieue, has the same negative connotations that “inner city” carries in English. The banlieues that ring Paris are concrete deserts fi lled with sterile housing projects. Joblessness there reaches 30 percent to 40 percent. It’s even higher among young men, such as the two who died in the relay station.

Many see the banlieues as symbols of France’s failure to integrate more of its Muslims, some of whom have been in France for three generations. The 2005 rioting spread to other Paris suburbs, and then elsewhere in France. The government called a state of emergency. By the time it was over, rioters had torched nearly 3,000 cars. Police had arrested nearly 9,000 people. One man died, in addition to the two whose deaths set off the rioting. Damages were estimated at €200 million (about $286 million in 2009 dollars).



France has a strong tradition of religious freedom. But it’s coupled with a strong tradition of secularism. This means, among other things, that students or employees in public schools may not wear “conspicuous” religious symbols. The law applies equally to Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps, and large Christian crosses. But members of those groups see the ban as an infringement on their religious freedom. The ban affects immigrants out of proportion to their numbers, in part because they haven’t adopted France’s secular ways.

Religious Freedom and Secularism in France




But even when it was offi cially “over,” car burnings continued. The banlieues remained a tinderbox. In March 2006 the French parliament passed an “equal opportunity” law. It meant to improve education, create jobs, and open up the banlieues. The government launched programs such as one to encourage young people to start their own businesses. But it’s not clear that much has changed since 2005. And people still torch cars in the banlieues.

Racial and Ethnic Discrimination Against Immigrants in Britain

British law prohibits racial discrimination. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. In 2009 the US State Department, for instance, cited evidence of discrimination against people of African, Afro-Caribbean, South Asian, and Middle Eastern origin. A British group called Victim Support fi elded nearly 30,000 calls for help in cases of “racially motivated incidents” between April 2005 and March 2007. This was a big increase over a prior period. The group said, though, that the higher number refl ects better referrals from the police rather than more incidents.

However, prosecutions for “racially aggravated crimes” have also risen. Prosecutors in England and Wales, with a combined population of around 55 million, brought cases against 7,430 defendants in connection with such crimes between April 2005 and March 2007.

In October 2008 the British government minister in charge of policing said she would review the way English and Welsh police forces recruit and promote offi cers. This came shortly after Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, announced his own investigation of race and London’s Metropolitan Police Force, or MET.

Word of Johnson’s inquiry followed a statement from the MET’s Black Police Association (BPA) that it would boycott efforts to recruit offi cers from ethnic minority communities. In fact, the BPA said it would actively discourage black and Asian recruits. Such recruits would be “treated unfairly,” the BPA said.

The National Association of Muslim Police, however, said it would not take part in the boycott. That group said that the MET was making progress in race relations.

The Diffi culties al-Qaeda and Its Allies Have Posed for Europe

Europe is dealing not only with diffi culties associated with changing demographics—a population’s makeup in race, ethnicity, and culture, among other characteristics. It is also confronting terrorism within its borders from radical groups, many of them Muslim. The 9/11 terror attacks weren’t felt just in the United States. They were felt in Europe, too. Soon after the event, Le Monde, an infl uential French newspaper, ran a headline saying, “Nous sommes tous Américains”—“We are all Americans.”



This touched Americans deeply. But Europeans weren’t just expressing moral support. The 9/11 attacks affected them directly. Dozens of Europeans died when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York collapsed.

The 9/11 attacks weren’t Europe’s fi rst encounter with terrorism. Britain has faced the Irish Republican Army (more on them later), as well as Zionists trying to get the British out of Palestine. Spain has long confronted Basque separatists, who want a state of their own. During the 1970s West Germany suffered violence at the hands of radical leftist groups such as the Red Army Faction and the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Italy had its extreme-left Red Brigades.

But the new challenge from al-Qaeda is different. It’s different in its scale of operations, for one thing. During the fi rst few years of the twenty-fi rst century, al-Qaeda struck on nearly every continent.

Al-Qaeda is different in the scale of its ambitions, too. History is full of examples of guerrillas, and even terrorists, who have laid down arms to take a seat at the negotiating table and pursue achievable, concrete goals. By contrast, al-Qaeda’s agenda is global. As you read in Chapter 1, Lesson 4, it seeks to unite all Muslims and to reestablish the caliphate, the Muslim empire of centuries past. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has said that this can be done only by force. Al-Qaeda seeks to overthrow nearly all Muslim governments. It sees them as hopelessly corrupt. It also aims to drive Western infl uence out of Muslim lands. Eventually it would abolish state boundaries. This is not a group with which the West can negotiate.




At this writing, Europe has suffered two signifi cant terror attacks since 9/11. On 11 March 2004 bombs in a Madrid commuter rail station killed 191 people and injured some 1,500. On 7 July 2005 four suicide bombers in the London subway killed 52 people, as well as themselves, and injured 700 others. It was the deadliest bombing in London since World War II.

Analysts differ in their interpretation of the Madrid bombings. Immediately afterward the Spanish government blamed the Basque separatists. But evidence soon suggested that Islamic extremists were behind the attacks. Then the question became whether they were connected to al-Qaeda, and if so how. Spanish offi cials described them as “homegrown.” But other analysts weren’t so sure. They saw the bombers as “local,” but certainly linked to the al-Qaeda network. A British Broadcasting Corporation report in 2005 called the Madrid attacks “the bloody calling card of the new al-Qaeda, a loose network of jihadi groups, locally recruited and acting independently of Osama Bin Laden.”

The al-Qaeda connection to the London bombings was apparently even looser. The group that carried out these attacks was made up of homegrown terrorists. While they were not members of al-Qaeda, they modeled themselves after that organization.

The Dangers Associated With Radical Terrorists

Radical terrorists have shown themselves willing to throw away their own lives, and to take those of their neighbors and fellow citizens with them, for the sake of a cause that promises only more death and destruction.

As you have read, Islamic civilization at its height saw a fl ourishing of science, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, literature, and other forms of learning. Muslim scholars helped reconnect medieval Western Europe with its Greco-Roman heritage. But al-Qaeda and its ideological running mates have distorted Islam. They have pressed it into service of an ideology that leads only to more hatred, anger, fear, ugliness, destruction, and death.

One of the lessons of the London and Madrid bombings was the need to fi ght al-Qaeda’s ideology, and not just its organized killers. Al-Qaeda infl uences far more people than it controls.

The Tension Between Allowing Freedom and Protecting Citizens’ Security

As in the United States, Europe’s struggle against terrorism has created tensions between citizens’ rights and their security. A national government’s two chief tasks are defending its borders and protecting its citizens. Even people who believe less government is better agree that those two tasks are important.



But for most Europeans and Americans, security isn’t the only thing that counts. Personal freedoms—civil liberties—are essential, too. To give them up would be to give up something that’s at the heart of national identity. To spend too much freedom to buy security would mean the terrorists have won.

In time of war or great emergency, though, citizens sometimes give up some freedoms in the short term in the interest of security in the long term. The balance between freedom and security becomes harder to maintain at these moments. Societies must think through, What’s really different now? Is this new threat severe enough to require us to give up some of our freedom?

In some cases, the answer may be yes. The British, for instance, have a robust tradition of free speech and freedom of religion. But they have felt a need to act against radical Islamist preachers. One of these was Abu Hamza al-Masri. An Egyptian-born British citizen, he has called for God to destroy the United States. He was mentor to, among others, Richard Reid. Reid was the “shoe bomber,” who tried to blow up an American Airlines fl ight from Paris to Miami in December 2001.

In 2003 the Charity Commission, which has some control over houses of worship, dismissed Abu Hamza al-Masri for making “inappropriate political statements.” A British court subsequently convicted him of inciting murder and racial hate. The United States has sought to bring him to New York for trial on terrorism charges.

The Internal Threat of Radical Terrorists Who Emigrate Into a Country

In this atmosphere, opening up to the world can put a country at risk. That’s the challenge Europe has faced as it has sought to open its borders to newcomers. As the European Union has worked toward a “single market” and the free movement of people, offi cials of different countries have surrendered some control and learned to take one another’s word about whom to let in and whom to exclude. It isn’t always easy.

Mohamed Atta was any immigration offi cial’s nightmare. An Egyptian architectural student, he went to Germany to study at the Technical University of Hamburg. He had studied German at Cairo’s Goethe Institute. The institute is one of the many such centers the German government supports around the world to teach and share German language and culture.

For Atta, though, German language study led indirectly to involvement with political Islam. It was a case of the law of unintended consequences. While in Hamburg, he attended the Al Quds Mosque in Hamburg, known for its harsh, militant version of Sunni Islam. It apparently radicalized him.




Atta eventually became the leader of a terrorist cell known as the “Hamburg cell” of al-Qaeda. A terrorist cell is a small group of usually three to fi ve terrorists who work together, separate from other groups nearby. For reasons of secrecy, such groups are intentionally kept “in the dark” about one another’s existence.

The Hamburg cell helped plan and execute the 9/11 attacks. Atta was at the controls of American Airlines Flight 11 when it crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. on 11 September 2001.

In the case of the Madrid bombings, those who see a closer rather than a looser link to al-Qaeda point to the participation of people from outside Spain. One analyst who studied the record closely found that most of those involved in the attacks were Moroccan immigrants, not native-born Spaniards.

But, on the other hand, for many people the real horror of the London bombings the following year was that the attackers weren’t immigrants, but native sons. Moreover, there was little in their backgrounds to suggest they were particularly vulnerable to radicalization, an offi cial report found. Learning to understand how young men and women become radicalized is essential to fi ghting terrorism.

Suicide bombers may be terrorism’s foot soldiers. But its followers who grew up in Europe are considered some of al-Qaeda’s most dangerous members. They tend to be better educated than their counterparts who grew up in the Middle East or South Asia. As Europeans, they blend better into Western societies, too. So Europe remains an important front for al-Qaeda.

The Legal Challenges of Arresting and Prosecuting Suspected Terrorists

Many observers have said that the United States has tended to see the fi ght against terrorism as a war. Europeans, in this view, have tended to see terrorism as a law-enforcement problem. Others say those descriptions oversimplify the issue. In either case, since the Madrid and London bombings, Europeans have ratcheted up their counterterrorism efforts much as their American cousins already had.

European governments have faced many of the same challenges as the United States did with regard to sharing information on terror suspects among agencies and countries. In some cases, analysts see gaps in the law that make it hard to prosecute terror suspects.

In response to terror attacks, Europe has moved to “harmonize” or standardize its national laws. Europeans have also introduced a European arrest warrant. In theory this eliminates problems with extradition.



British and German counterterrorism offi cials in particular have moved from a reactive to a preventive approach. That is, they have moved forward with preventive measures rather than waiting for something to happen. They are also going after suspected terrorists for any minor violation they can identify. In this way they hope to disrupt large-scale plots before they can be carried out.

Like the United States, both Britain and Germany have changed their policies about cooperation between different kinds of agencies. In all three countries, intelligence agencies (the CIA and its counterparts) can now share information with agencies investigating crimes (the FBI and its counterparts). In all three countries, law enforcement can step in and make arrests earlier in the development of a terror plot.

Some countries don’t have the laws they need on their books for successful prosecution of terrorists. Many laws have been changed since the 9/11 attacks. But more changes are needed.

The Background of Ethnic and Religious Strife in Northern Ireland

Britain in recent decades had to deal with native-born terrorists, not just confl icts with outside terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. The roots of these troubles date back for centuries in England’s relationship with Ireland. English kings started crossing the Irish Sea trying to assert control over Ireland during the Middle Ages. But the best place to start this story would be in 1536, nearly a century past the Middle Ages, right after the Protestant Reformation. That’s when King Henry VIII became serious about getting Ireland under the English crown’s control. He was worried about the loyalty of Catholic lords.

What Henry began, Elizabeth I and James I completed. English authorities in Dublin unifi ed the island under a central government. They were less successful in winning the Catholic Irish over to Henry’s new Church of England, though. The brutal methods the English used to put the Irish down created resentment that has endured right up to today.

Into the early seventeenth century, crown governments colonized Ireland. They sent Scottish and English Protestants—often against their will—to settle there and overwhelm the Catholics with their numbers. The British settlers became Ireland’s ruling class. They worshipped at the Church of Ireland. This is a Protestant church, the Irish branch of the Church of England. It was the established church. This means that it was a church offi cially favored by the state and supported by tax revenues. A series of Penal Laws discriminated against all other faiths. They hit Roman Catholics especially hard, but affected Scottish Presbyterians, too.




By the late eighteenth century the same political ferment that led to the American and French revolutions led also to an Irish uprising against British rule. The Irish Rebellion of 1798 was unsuccessful, though. In response, the British in 1801 merged their Kingdom of Ireland with the Kingdom of Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales). This created the United Kingdom.

Perhaps the bitterest period in Irish history followed when a disease struck the island’s potato crop between 1845 and 1852. Potatoes were the main food for a large share of the population. As the crops failed, and the British government failed to respond adequately, more than 1 million Irish people starved and another 1 million emigrated—many to the United States.



As a result of the famine, the cause of Irish independence regained traction in the nineteenth century. The fi rst years of the twentieth century saw an experiment in “home rule” and then an Irish civil war.

In 1921 an Anglo-Irish treaty partitioned, or divided, Ireland. The partition created the Irish Free State, made up of 26 counties to the south, and Northern Ireland, consisting of six counties in the north. The Irish Free State had “dominion” status within the British Empire, like Canada or Australia. Northern Ireland had “home rule.’’ It managed its own domestic affairs. But it was considered an integral part of Britain, or the United Kingdom.

The partition was made along religious lines. The six counties to the north had a Protestant majority. This was Henry VIII’s legacy, since he had “planted” the strongly Catholic north with Protestants to keep it under control.

Soon after its launch the Irish Free State went through more civil war. The issue then, as earlier, was whether half a loaf, or three-fourths of a loaf, was better than none. In principle, Irish nationalists wanted to see all of Ireland out from under British rule. But they were divided. Should they accept the Irish Free State as a fi rst step, and hope to regain the six counties eventually? Or should they hold out for all 32 counties?

Those willing to accept the Irish Free State as a fi rst step won out. It became simply “Ireland” in 1937 and offi cially a republic in 1949. At that point it left the Commonwealth, the successor institution to the British Empire.

An independent Ireland was conceived of as “a Catholic state.” The Republic of Ireland’s constitution lays (theoretical) claim to the entire island. It embodies the hope, in other words, that partition is only temporary.

Dublin

Atlantic

Ocean

Irish

Sea

Celtic

Sea

Belfast

REPUBLIC OF

IRELAND

NORTHERN IRELAND




The people of Northern Ireland, on the other hand, fear that partition is only temporary. The majority of its people, of Scottish or English descent, are known as loyalists or unionists. They are loyal to the link to Britain. They want the union maintained. Northern Ireland was conceived of as “a Protestant state for a Protestant people.” For years, its majority discriminated against its nationalist, or Irish Catholic, minority in jobs and housing. Nationalists faced almost complete exclusion from the political process.

From 1921 to 1973 Northern Ireland had its own parliament and prime minister. The government handled local issues, such as education and law enforcement, leaving matters such as defense and foreign policy to the British national government in London. It was a division rather like that of the American federal system.

But by 1973 conditions in the province had gotten so bad that the British government suspended home rule and imposed direct rule from London. Sectarian violence was getting out of hand. Bombings and shootings were the order of the day. Organized crime raised money for paramilitary forces on both sides. The police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, was overwhelmingly Protestant. It did not enjoy the confi dence of the Catholic population.

The British government put an offi cial in London, with the title of secretary of State for Northern Ireland, in charge of the province and of resolving the issues behind “the troubles.”

The Views of Catholic Nationalists and Protestant Loyalists in Northern Ireland and the Tensions Between Them

The situation in Northern Ireland is often regarded as purely a religious confl ict. American news organizations tend to describe the two sides as Catholics and Protestants. Those are familiar categories. They take less explanation. But there’s a difference between political views and religious identities.

Many early Irish nationalists were in fact Protestants. It’s a point that’s often overlooked. The leaders of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, for instance, were largely Protestant.

But broadly speaking today, the overwhelming majority of Protestants want to remain within the United Kingdom. That is, their political views are unionist or loyalist. Catholics tend to be nationalist or republican. That is, they want to be part of an independent Irish Republic.

Another critical difference is over people’s willingness to use force to achieve their ends. Constitutional nationalists seek to reunify Ireland by means of political persuasion. Not so the more radical elements on the republican side, who have often resorted to violence. Likewise, on the loyalist side, some work through political channels. Others have taken up arms.



Each side in Northern Ireland tends to see itself as a minority. Nationalists see themselves as an oppressed minority within the six counties. Unionists see themselves as a minority within the whole of Ireland; they fear being abandoned by Britain and being swallowed up in a “popish”—Catholic-dominated—Republic.

The Protestant population of the Republic of Ireland has fallen since partition, from a little more than 7 percent to about half that today. But the Catholic population of the North has risen since partition. This is a result of higher birthrates among Catholics. In the near term, new electoral procedures make nationalist votes count for more. Politicians have to pay more attention to them. Protestants have to look ahead to a time when they won’t have the votes to block a referendum on joining the Republic of Ireland.




The Confl icts Between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the British Military

A civil rights movement arose in the 1960s to win fairer treatment for Northern Ireland’s Catholics. Its leaders consciously took African-Americans’ struggle for racial justice in the United States as their model. When British soldiers arrived in Northern Ireland as “the troubles” began, they came to protect the Catholics’ civil rights. It was similar to the way federal troops had protected the rights of young American blacks to attend certain schools and universities just a few years before in the United States.

But by that time, the British had oppressed the Irish for so long that the British Army wasn’t credible as defenders of Catholic civil rights. Instead, they soon became a party to the dispute. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) was one of their main adversaries. For decades the IRA ran a terrorist campaign against the British military presence in Northern Ireland.



The IRA is the armed wing of Sinn Fein (“We Ourselves”), a leading nationalist party, which has long pushed for Irish reunifi cation. Because of its armed wing, Sinn Fein was kept out of discussions on Northern Ireland’s future, even though it draws a considerable share of the vote. The IRA’s laying down of arms under the Good Friday agreement of 1998 has allowed Sinn Fein a seat at the table.

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998

The door to restored local government in Northern Ireland began to open in the mid-1990s. Successive British governments and the Clinton administration in the United States encouraged a number of peace gestures in Northern Ireland. In response, the main body of the IRA called a cease-fi re. And former US Senator George Mitchell led a series of negotiations that lasted nearly two years. These fi nally resulted in the Good Friday Agreement.

By the time the accord was signed, “the troubles” in Northern Ireland had cost 3,600 lives. Of these, 2,000 were civilians, another 1,000 were members of the security forces, and 600 were members of paramilitary groups. These last were members of the IRA and their loyalist counterparts.

The Good Friday Agreement won support from majorities in both the Republic and the North’s six counties. Its key parts include:

• “Devolved government”—home rule by local authorities rather than from London (that is, the British government)

• Commitment to work toward “total disarmament” of paramilitary groups, the IRA and its allies, and their unionist counterparts

• Police reform, so that both communities have confi dence in local law enforcement

• New, stronger mechanisms to ensure equal rights and equal opportunity

• Mechanisms for involving the Republic of Ireland’s government in the governance of the North, such as the British-Irish Council.

As of December 1999 Northern Ireland once again had its own government. The Good Friday Agreement called for an elected assembly, with 108 seats, plus a cabinet of 12 ministers. Unionists and nationalists share responsibility within the cabinet. Northern Ireland also elects 18 members to the Westminster Parliament in London.

fi

fastFACTffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssstttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssaa FFFFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCTTTTTTTTTTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT




Real progress has taken place. A new police force has replaced the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The IRA has laid down most of its arms. After a few bumps in the road to peace, the St. Andrews Agreement of 2007 cleared the way for actual home rule.

Elsewhere, however, Europe in the 1990s saw the outbreak of its worst ethnic violence since World War II when the multiethnic federation of Yugoslavia fell apart following the end of the Cold War. The fi ghting in and among the former Yugoslav republics and the atrocities that took place there became so severe that NATO was forced to intervene. That story is the subject of the next lesson.



Ireland isn’t the only divided island in Europe. The Mediterranean island of Cyprus has been unoffi cially partitioned since 1974. It has two communities, Greek and Turkish. Each has a distinct identity based on religion, language, and ties with its “motherland.”

In 1960 Cyprus won independence from the British. It became a republic. Its constitution included protections for the Turkish Cypriots. (A Cypriot is a citizen of Cyprus.) The Greek Cypriot leadership, though, soon sought to do away with these. The stated reason was more government effi ciency. To the Turkish Cypriots, however, the talk about effi ciency was cover for something else. The Greek Cypriots wanted enosis, or union, with Greece. Violence broke out. The Turkish Cypriots soon after set up a “provisional administration,” a kind of alternative government.

In 1974 the military junta then ruling Greece sponsored a coup against the Greek Cypriot government. The plotters thought the Cypriot leadership wasn’t pushing hard enough for enosis. At this point, the Turkish government intervened militarily to help the Turkish Cypriots. A treaty that was signed when Cyprus gained independence allowed this. Today the Turkish Cypriot administration controls about a third of the island.

The UN has long tried to resolve the division. A UN peacekeeping force maintains a buffer between the two sectors. In recent years, Cyprus has joined the EU. But the Turkish part of Cyprus does not benefi t from the EU membership. And the EU has signaled that the Cypriot dispute must be settled before Turkey’s own EU membership bid can proceed.

The Cyprus Confl ict

Nicosia

Turkish-Cypriot-administered area

Area controlled by Cyprus government(Greek-Cypriot area)

UN buffer zone

CYPRUS

ALBANIA

GREECE

AegeanSea

IonianSea

CreteMALTA

Rhodes

TURKEY

BULGARIA

BlackSea

CROATIA

BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA

SERBIA

KOSOVO

MACEDONIA

MONTENEGRO

SYRIA

CYPRUS

Nicosia

ITALY

ROMANIA



EuropeppppppppppppEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooopppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee✔ POINTSO SOOOOOOOOOOOOO SSSSSSSSSSSSSPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSCHECKCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC

Lesson 3 Review Using complete sentences, answer the following questions on a sheet of paper.

1. When and why did the fi rst Turkish “guest workers” arrive in Germany?

2. Why did the EU curb the free movement of labor at its 2004 expansion?

3. Members of which ethnic group in Europe were required to wear black triangles at one point during the twentieth century? Under what circumstances?

4. Aggressive policing was blamed for which series of events in France in late 2005?

5. Who was Mohamed Atta and what was the Hamburg cell?

6. Why are European Muslims seen as some of al-Qaeda’s most dangerous members?

7. What is the difference between Northern Ireland’s nationalists and unionists?

8. What is the Good Friday Agreement?

Applying Your Learning 9. How do you think governments should best balance freedom

and security in the face of terrorism?


Documents

LESSONLESSON 3 Immigration, Terrorist Cells, and Ethnic