In an article published in the London newspaper The Guardian last month, the well-known academic Anthony Giddens ascribed the recent popularity of the far right in Europe to the failure of center-left parties in European countries to rise to the challenge of reform and modernization.
As a remedy, he urged the governing center-left parties in Britain, Germany and elsewhere to engage in more modernization, in particular to adopt tough anti-immigration policies to deprive the far right of its most important card.
Giddens is the celebrated advocate of the so-called “Third Way,” and adviser to both British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former US President Bill Clinton.
The gist of the Third Way is for left-leaning parties to steal as much of the policies and rhetoric of the new right, as compatible with a minimal commitment to socialism, in order to poach many of its voters.
Giddens is aware of the criticism voiced by many who believe that the retreat in popular support for left-wing parties and their loss of power in Denmark, Holland, Italy, France and elsewhere is mainly due to the fact that they have become too right-wing for their own good. But he responds by arguing that the problem of the left is that it has not moved far enough towards the center. Core left support among voters is estimated at 10 percent and is fast dwindling. These parties have not, therefore, come to power because of a surge in support for the left, but due to their success in winning the hearts and minds of voters from the center and right.
This has been achieved mainly by advocating policies traditionally associated with the right: promising to be tough on crime, reforming the welfare state and advocating sound monetary policies. It is therefore pointless to argue, Giddens says, that their current unpopularity could be remedied by a return to more radical policies. What they need are more Third Way steps, not less.
Giddens’ critics were quick to point out that his call for appeasement of the far right, by adopting its policies in the same way as the left emulated the new right during the last decade, is both misguided and dangerous. Pandering to the racist inclinations of the masses is hardly the way forward. To start with, Western economies do need migrant workers, and as it turns out, over 80 percent of them come from the developed world. Asylum seekers and Third World immigrants do not come here for fun, and most of them have to flee dangerous situations. Their right for asylum is guaranteed under international law. In any case, it is Western meddling in their home countries ­ as in the cases of Iraq, Afghanistan or Palestine ­ which caused these people’s plight in the first place.
Even if the asylum seekers were considered economic migrants, this should be an acceptable aspect of the current globalization of the world economy. Everyone seems to be singing the praises of free trade and the dismantling of trade barriers. Under these circumstances, it is only fair for people also to seek prosperity where they can and not be hindered by artificial barriers. If Western economies need more workers, what justifies discriminating against prospective workers on racial, cultural or political grounds? Is this not pure racism?
Racism may not be the right word for the new endemic xenophobia sweeping the West at the moment. Some critics of Europe, in particular in the United States and Israel, are alleging that Europe is witnessing a resurgence of its own peculiar and very culturally specific brand of racism: anti-Semitism.
This criticism is unfair for many reasons. First, the accusations stem not from any expression of racism, but from the reverse: the expression of European concern for the plight of the Palestinians. Far from being a manifestation of racism, European concern for justice for the Palestinians is a humane sentiment which is to be criticized, if at all, for not being forceful enough. Accusing Europeans who deplore Israeli brutality against the defenseless Palestinians of hating Jews, is nothing short of crude blackmail by the real racists in this drama.
This leads us to the second point: The emerging racism in the West is in fact shared by Israelis and Americans and being promoted by them. In some British circles, a new term has been coined for this new brand of racism: Islamophobia. Like anti-Semitism, this is a kind of racism which is targeted to a single religious and cultural community ­ the Muslims.
What is disturbing about this brand of racism is that it is being promoted by leading intellectuals who are otherwise considered liberal and anti-racist. But then again, anti-Semitism was also the invention of leading European intellectuals in its early days. Leading thinkers provided the intellectual and moral justification, and then left it for the rabble to run away with the ball. However, it was also courageous and conscientious intellectuals like Emile Zola, who led the fight against blind racism and paved the way for banishing it from mainstream cultural and political life.
What is disturbing now, is that leading ethically sensitive intellectuals are today not only vying with crude racists in vilifying Islam and Muslims, but sometimes leading the way.
The problem did not start with the Sept. 11 disaster in the United States, but goes back much further. One could look at the Salman Rushdie affair on 1989 as the watershed. Western intellectuals were horrified at the amount of anger expressed by Muslims against Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, and they gave free reign to all sorts of anti-Muslim prejudices. Then came the 1991 Gulf War, and the clash of civilizations thesis (originally coined by the pro-Israeli orientalist Bernard Lewis) ­ which became the sign of the times. From that point on, the Jean-Marie Le Pens and Pim Fortuyns of this world became merely a footnote. Racist politicians taught hate, “liberal” intellectuals justified and rationalized it.
Sept. 11, of course, opened the floodgates. “Why do they hate us?” (It is, again, those “intellectuals” asking.) And the answer: Because we are so nice, so rich, so “intelligent,” and … so liberal. So let us bomb the hell out of them to teach them to love us. And while we are at it, let us keep our doors tightly closed, so that those escaping our bombers may not come here and spoil our liberal paradise which has no place for bloody foreigners. And let us call this the Third Way, or designer, intellectual kosher racism.

Abdelwahab El-Affendi is a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. He wrote this commentary for The Daily Star

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