Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (147 page)

Those whose wages were too low to support them and their families could still turn to the welfare state, and many did. In the UK, where the Thatcherite assault on state and society alike had been felt most acutely, 14 million people now lived in poverty, including 4 million children.
³⁶⁵
One person in six depended upon Income Support or Family Credit programmes to keep them above the poverty line. Homelessness, which in northern Europe at least had been effectively eradicated by the end of the 1950s, was once again on the increase: in the course of the Thatcher years the number of homeless in London alone rose ten-fold. By the mid-’90s it had reached 80,000. Within a few miles of some of the most expensive real estate in the world parts of the British capital were beginning to resemble the ‘Outcast London’ of late-Victorian notoriety.
³⁶⁶

Whereas, in the past, economic upswings had tended to lift many of the poor into better paid and more secure employment, this was no longer happening. Europe, in other words, was developing an under-class in the midst of plenty. As the French sociologist André Gorz had predicted back in the 1960s, the end of the industrial era would see the birth of a new caste of casual, temporary workers—a ‘non-class of non-workers’—at once marginal to modern life and yet somehow right at its heart.
³⁶⁷

Like its American equivalent, the European under-class was determined not only by poverty and unemployment (or under-employment) but also and increasingly by race: in the mid-’90s the unemployment rate in London for young
black
men was 51 percent. The poor, like Europe as a whole by the end of the century, were strikingly multinational—or ‘multicultural’ as it had become custom to describe it, in acknowledgement of the fact that many dark-skinned Dutchmen or Germans or Brits were the native-born children or even grandchildren of the original Moroccan or Turkish or Pakistani immigrants. Towns like Rotterdam or Leicester were now multi-lingual and multi-colored in a way that would have amazed anyone returning after an absence of even just two decades. In 1998, white children were a minority in the local authority (i.e. public) secondary schools of inner London.

Europe’s major cities, London above all, were now truly cosmopolitan. If the high-paying city jobs were still going to white Europeans (and North Americans) nearly all the low-paying work, from street-cleaning to child-care, was now done not by traditional ‘second-class’ Europeans from the
Alentejo
or the
Mezzogiorno
but by ‘minorities’, often black or brown, many of them without working papers. According to official figures the net increase in foreigners living in London and the south-east of England in the years 1992-2002 was 700,000; but the actual number was distinctly higher.

Immigration, though perennially discouraged and rigorously controlled throughout Western Europe, was thus still a major demographic factor: of those same inner-London children of 1998, one third did not use English as their first language. These were frequently the offspring of refugees, ‘asylum-seekers’ in the jargon of the day, whose numbers had ballooned in the wake of the Yugoslav wars; but also of migrant workers from Central and South-East Asia, the Middle East and much of Africa—many of them illegal and thus undocumented.

In Germany, whose asylum facilities were (and remain) by far the most generous in Europe
³⁶⁸
but where it was traditionally very difficult for immigrants to obtain full citizenship, it was estimated that there were five million such people—counting families and dependants—by the end of the century. The majority of asylum applications to Germany by the beginning of the new century came from Iraq, Turkey and the countries of former Yugoslavia, but there were also growing numbers from Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and Vietnam.

The fear that Western Europe might be ‘overrun’ by ‘economic refugees’, illegal immigrants, asylum-seekers and the like contributed to a widespread lack of enthusiasm for EU enlargement. Already by the 1980s undocumented workers from Poland were present in large numbers in the British and German building trades. But the problem was not so much Poland, or Hungary, or the other would-be accession states of Central Europe, but rather the lands to their east. In 1992 Poland itself had 290,000 ‘irregular’ immigrants, mostly from Bulgaria, Romania and the former USSR; Hungary, with a population of just 10 million, was home to over 100,000 asylum-seekers. Whereas life there—or in Slovakia or the Czech Republic—was hard, it was not intolerable and the gap separating these countries from their Western neighbours was already being bridged, however slowly. The gulf between Central Europe and the rest of post-Communist Europe, however, yawned far greater.

Thus whereas by the late-Nineties the average monthly wage in Poland and the Czech Republic was already approaching $400, in Belarus, Ukraine and Romania it hovered around $80; in Bulgaria at under $70; and in Moldova at just $30—itself a misleading average, since outside of the capital, Chisinau, incomes were lower still, in a population of whom 48 percent still worked on the land. And unlike Poland, or even Bulgaria, the condition of the former Soviet republics was not improving: by the year 2000, one Moldovan in two was earning less than $220 a year—just $19 a month.

In such circumstances the only hope for Moldovans—or Ukrainians, or indeed many Russians outside of the major conurbations—was to find work in the West. And so an alarming number of them—young women above all—ended up in the hands of criminal syndicates, shipped into the EU through Romania and the Balkans to be employed at best as indentured servants in workshops and restaurants, at worst and more often as prostitutes: in Germany or Italy—or even Bosnia, servicing a well-paid clientele of Western soldiers, administrators and ‘aid-workers’. Involuntary Moldovan and Ukrainian ‘guest-workers’ thus joined the Roma (Gypsies) at the bottom of the continent’s multi-cultural heap.
³⁶⁹

The victims of the sex trade were largely invisible—like earlier generations of white migrants from Europe’s fringes they blended easily enough into the local majority, which is why they proved so hard for police and social services to trace. But most of the people whom French sociologists and critics had taken to describing as
les exclus
(‘the excluded’) were perfectly visible. The new under-class consisted of people excluded not so much from work as from ‘life chances’: individuals stranded outside the economic mainstream, their children poorly educated, their families marooned in barrack-like apartment blocks at the edge of cities, bereft of shops, services and transport. In 2004, a study by the French interior ministry concluded that some two million such people lived in urban ghettos blighted by social exclusion, racial discrimination and high levels of domestic violence. In some of these
quartiers chauds
youth unemployment had reached 50 percent; the worst affected were young people of Algerian or Moroccan descent.

All too often this under-class was distinguished not just by colour but by creed. For in addition to being multi-cultural the European Union was now increasingly multi-religious. Christians remained in the overwhelming majority, albeit non-practicing in most cases. Jews were now a small minority, their numbers significant only in Russia, France and to a much lesser extent the UK and Hungary. But Hindus and above all Muslims were now a substantial and visible presence in the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, as well as in the main cities of Scandinavia, Italy and Central Europe. And—uniquely among the major world religions in Europe—the number of adherents to Islam was rising rapidly.

By the first years of the twenty-first century there were perhaps six million Muslims in France (the majority of North African extraction) and almost as many in Germany (chiefly of Turkish or Kurdish background). Together with the nearly two million Muslims in the UK (mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh) and a significant presence in the Benelux countries and Italy, these figures suggested a total of perhaps fifteen million Muslims in the Union as a whole.

The Muslim presence in communities that were hitherto overwhelmingly secularposed difficult questions of social policy: what provision should be made for the wearing of religious clothing or symbols in public schools? How far should the state encourage (or discourage) separate cultural institutions and facilities? Was it good policy to support multi-cultural (and thus effectively separate) communities or should the authorities seek rather to facilitate and even enforce integration? Official policy in France advocated cultural integration and forbade the display of signs of faith in school; elsewhere, notably in Britain and the Netherlands, there was a broader tolerance for cultural distinction and assertive religious self-identification. But opinion everywhere was divided (see Chapter 23).

If such questions had risen rapidly to the top of national political agendas, and were increasingly entangled in debates over immigration and asylum, it was because of growing anxiety all across the continent at the rise of a new generation of xenophobic parties. Some of these parties had roots in an earlier age of sectarian or nationalist politics; others—like the surprisingly successful Dansk Folkeparti or the List Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands—were of very recent provenance. But all of them had proven unexpectedly adept at exploiting ‘anti-immigrant’ sentiment.

Whether, like the British National Party, they railed against ‘ethnic minorities’ or, like the Front National’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, they targeted ‘immigrants’—in German the preferred term was ‘foreigners’ or ‘aliens’—the parties of the far Right found rich pickings in these years. On the one hand slower growth combined with vulnerability to global economic forces was exposing many working people to a level of economic insecurity unprecedented in living memory. On the other hand the old organs of the political
Left
were no longer in place to corral and mobilize that insecurity under the banner of class: it was not by chance that the Front National often got its best results in districts that had once been bastions of the French Communist Party.

The presence in increasing numbers of a visible and culturally alien minority in their midst—and the prospect of even more foreigners feeding at the welfare trough or taking ‘our’ jobs once the floodgates from the East were opened—was icing on the cake for the new Right. Charging that the ‘boat is full’—or that their governments had abandoned control of its frontiers to ‘cosmopolitan interests’ or the ‘bureaucrats of Brussels’—populist demagogues promised to stop immigration, repatriate ‘foreigners’ and return the state to its embattled white citizenry, outsiders in their own country.

Compared with the Fascism of an earlier age this latest manifestation of xenophobia might appear mild—though Germany saw a wave of hate crimes against foreigners and minorities in the early Nineties that prompted some commentators to raise broader concerns: Günter Grass pointed accusingly to the self-centered indifference of West German political culture and the country’s myopic enthusiasm for an ‘unmerited’ unity, arguing that responsibility for the racist violence (especially in the festering, defunct industrial towns of the former GDR where anti-foreigner feeling was most intense) should be placed squarely at the feet of the country’s complacent and amnesiac political elite.

But even if the level of violence was contained, the scale of public support for the new Right was cause for serious concern. Under Jörg Haider, its youthful and telegenic leader, the Freedom Party (FP) in neighbouring Austria—heir to the postwar League of Independents but ostensibly purged of the latter’s Nazi associations—rose steadily in the polls, presenting itself as the defender of the ‘little people’ left behind by the mutually beneficial collaboration of the two big parties and threatened by the hordes of ‘criminals’, ‘drug-users’ and other ‘foreign rabble’ now invading their homeland.

To avoid falling foul of the law, Haider was generally careful to avoid behaviour that would tar him too obviously with the brush of Nazi nostalgia. For the most part the Austrian (like Jean-Marie Le Pen) revealed his prejudices only indirectly—for example, by naming, as instances of whatever it was in public life that offended him, people who just happened to be Jewish. Both he and his audiences were more comfortable with newer targets like the European Union: ‘We Austrians should answer not to the EU, not to Maastricht, not to some international idea or other, but to this our Homeland’.

In the Austrian parliamentary elections of 1986, Haider’s Freedom Party won 9.7 percent of the vote. Four years later it had risen to 17 percent. In the elections of October 1994 it rocked the Viennese establishment by reaching 23 percent, just four points short of the People’s Party which had governed the country for the first twenty-five years after the war and which still dominated Austria’s rural provinces. Even more ominously, Haider had bitten deep into the traditionally Socialist electorate of working-class Vienna. Considering that (according to 1995 opinion polls) one Austrian in three believed with Haider that ‘guest-workers’ and other foreigners in Austria had too many benefits and privileges, this was hardly surprising.

Haider’s influence peaked at the very end of the century, in the wake of the elections of October 1999 when his party received the backing of 27 percent of Austria’s voters: pushing the People’s Party into third place and coming within 290,000 votes of the first-place Socialists. In February 2000, to somewhat exaggerated gasps of horror from Austria’s European partners, the People’s Party formed a coalition government with the Freedom Party (though not including Haider himself). But the new Austrian Chancellor, Wolfgang Schüssel, had made a shrewd calculation: the Freedom Party was a movement of protest, an anti-‘them’ party that appealed to ‘the ripped-off, lied-to little people’ (to quote Pierre Poujade, the eponymous populist prototype). Once in government, exposed to the wear and tear of office and constrained to share responsibility for unpopular policies, it would soon lose its appeal. In the elections of 2002 the FP scored just 10.1 percent (while the People’s Party had risen to nearly 43 percent). In the European elections of 2004 Haider’s party was reduced to 6.4 percent of the vote.