How well to islamic immigrants fit in , in Holland? From what I remember, the Dutch are very liberal about sex and nudity-the Dutch woamen wear pretty skimpy putfits at the beach. The muslims seem to frown on this…so how do the groups get along? Are the muslims agitating for dress codes in the schools?
I think you are first of all confusing Tunisia and Algeria to some extent. Tunisia did have reasonably free parliamentary elections in 1989, in which the Islamist party, An-Nahda, won 17% of the vote. In a few districts such as Tunis that proportion rose to as much as 1/3. But since the Tunisian electoral system works on a winner-takes-all system, they won not a single seat.
What was worrisome to Ben Ali, the president who had seized power in a 1987 coup, was that those results were strong enough to presage a strong minority opposition party with whom he would have to deal with, especially as the parliamentary results indicated that the Islamists were likely to do well ( if not necessarily win an outright majority ) in the future municipal elections, allowing for the establishment of a future electoral powerbase. Ben Ali was security chief under the rigidly authoritarian regime of Habib Bourgiba whom he overthrew - he has not a genuine democratic bone in his body. So he pretty much dispensed with the experiment in democracy and cracked down hard on the Islamists.
For their part, despite some salafist leanings, An-Nahda was one of the more moderate Islamist parties around, rather closer to Turkey’s Welfare Party than al-Qaeda. They had formally embraced ( lip-service at the very least ) the principles of multi-party democracy back in 1981 ( long before they were allowed to participate ), distanced themselves from violent hardliners ( even in 2003, despite still being officially banned, they publically condemned one of the few genuine major terrorist actions in Tunisia - the attack on the ancient synagogue in Djerba ), and shortly before the '89 election "…affirmed Tunisia’s liberal personal status code." Their suppression was a real blow to Tunisian democracy.
Algeria is where the Islamists were on the verge of winning a solid majority and potentially a 2/3 majority ( the elections were voided during the second count that would have shaken out those results ) that could have attempted amending the constitution. This provoked a worry among some secularists that the election would result in a ‘one man, one vote, one time’ scenario wherein the Islamists would have seized power such as to prevent further democratic elections and implement a theocracy.
However the fact is that Algeria’s parliament had serious built in weaknesses, which gave real power to the president. In addition the Algerian Islamists were a disparate lot or populists - analysts talk about the hardline ‘Salafists’ vs. more pragmatic, technocratic ‘Djazarists’, with the politics of the main Islamist party, the FIS, vacillating between the two poles/factions. In fact, much as in Turkey, a significant number of the voters supporting them appeared to support them as much as a protest against the cronyism and corruption of the ruling FLN as anything else. The Algerian president, Benjedid seemed largely unconcerned about the impending Islamist majority - he had the power to dissolve the assembly and governments at will. Other minority parties, like the ethnic Berber party the FFS, were also strongly in favor of continuing the elections.
But they were all swept aside by the paranoid thugocracy who controlled the military. Whatever the result of democracy in Algeria may have been, we’ll never know, because it never had a chance to manifest itself.
An overstatement at the very least, witnessing recent events in Turkey.
A suggestion for further reading - Islam, Politics and Pluralism: Theory and Practice in Turkey, Jordan, Tunisia and Algeria by Jennifer Noyon ( 2003, Royal Institute of International Affairs ). Very slim, well-received, almost pamphlet-sized volume at ~125 pgs. that explores this very question of democracy and Islamists with case studies of the countries mentioned above. Inexpensive and a quick read - well worth the trouble.
- Tamerlane
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[QUOTE=Ryan_Liam]
Then look at Australian immigration policy and tell me thats flawed. The purpose of immigration is sustain and enrich the economy first and foremost, everything else is a distant second.
QUOTE]**
You have a somewhat distorted view of Australian immigration policy I think. A very large proportion of our immigrants arent selected on the basis of economic skills but on humanitarian and family re-union grounds. The trend over time is that the skilled category is declining in importance and the family re-union category becomes more important as the immigrant communities grow in size.
2002-2003 data (being the most recent on the Immigration Department website) is:
Skilled Migration 38,504
Family Migration 28,066
Humanitarian 9,569
http://www.immi.gov.au/statistics/stat_info/oad/settlers/setdatb.htm
EC: Let’s all hope that it’s one of those [freedom-compatible] forms of Islam that’s dominant in Holland. From the headlines, you have to figure there’s a fair contingent of fundamentalist Islamics [! ;)] about. Or maybe they’re just making noise all out of proportion to their numbers, as fundies tend to.
Yes, I think the radical Muslim-extremist element is definitely over-represented when it comes to getting the public’s attention. Certainly there are some scary fundamentalists around, but as Arwin and others pointed out, the current attempts to monitor and discourage their incendiary activities are actually just continuations of a policy shift that started several years ago.
And the vast majority of Muslims that I encounter here in the Netherlands seem to be basically normal people speaking Dutch and eating cheese like everyone else. Maybe some of them are secret fanatics who go back home and conspire to kill Dutch politicians and institute shari’a law, but I doubt very much that a significant percentage of them are like that.
By the way, as an American living in a Dutch city, I don’t see any evidence of “pathological overcrowding” that some here have suggested may be contributing to assimilation problems. Sure, they have to use space more efficiently than we do in the US—no vast acres of parking lots in every suburban shopping center—but I don’t get any feeling of “too many rats in a cage” aggression. I’d say there’s much more aggressive impatience and frustration with crowding on the average American rush-hour highway than in the average Dutch bus or train.
(In any case, the Netherlands is actually much less densely populated than some self-proclaimed vacation paradises like Barbados and Bermuda. Are they overcrowded?)
You state that as a truism – and it ain’t. Speaking as an American – for the first hundred years or so of our history, there was no official immigration policy to speak of. The default position on immigration, if anyone bothered to state it, would have been, “Why not?” It’s a free country – if foreigners, for whatever reason, want to come here, let them. The only serious dissidents from this point of view were anti-Catholic nativists like the Know Nothings (who did not get their views enacted into public policy), and West Coast opponents of Chinese immigration (who did, but it took a while).
Then in the 1920s we adopted immigration quotas – the purpose of which was not to “sustain and enrich the economy,” but to preserve America’s character as a white man’s country.
The idea that immigration policy should be designed to “sustain and enrich the economy” is a very new one – here, and in Europe too, I should think.
I think the real question behind the poster’s question is, "Is it possible that a huge influx of immigrants who do not culturally assimilate with the existing culture could in effect “take over” a country like Holland through the Democratic process and use the power of the state obtained through free and fair elections to enact laws that are an anathema to the older inhab itants’ – such as Muslims enacting Sharia laws?
It seems to me that it’s conceivable that this could happen – what brakes if any are there to prevent it?
For the first hundred years (i.e. 1776-1876), most people farmed, and there was a practically unlimited supply of land if you went far enough west. Also, there was no welfare state, so there was no concern that the government would have to support immigrants who could not earn a living. Thus, the economic impact of immigration on the native economy was small.
Between 1876 and 1924, the economy changed from agricultural to industrial. During this time, the rationale for mass immigration became explicitly economic - the robber baron class wanted cheap labor to run its mines and mills at maximum profitability. From 1903 to 1940, federal immigration law was administered by the Department of Commerce and Labor. (Department of Labor was made separate in 1913, taking immigration with it.)
I agree with how you stated this, although I want to make the point that several restrictionists explicitly denounced racism. The argument was not that Anglo-Saxons were better than everyone else, just that America was fundamentally Anglo-Saxon and that this was worth preserving. In fact, some restrictionists expressed fear that Asian and Jewish populations, which some viewed as more vigorous than Anglo-Saxons, might prove difficult to compete with.
It is not new (see above regarding 1876-1924); it was just forgotten for a period when immigration was slow enough that white guilt alone, not economics, was enough to keep it going. Of course, it is the prerogative of any nation to restrict immigration regardless of the economic effects.