across the Continent without a passport. Only recently have border controls between many European countries been dropped (under the EU’s Schengen agreement), but already some countries are wondering what they have let themselves in for.
Since October 1997, flights between Italy, France, Germany, the Benelux countries, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Sweden and Finland have had domestic status, while land border controls are virtually nonexistent. The big worry now is that there are no secondary lines of defence to pick up illegal or undesirable immigrants – once they have made it into one of the countries, they can travel unimpeded to any of the others with little fear of being caught at border crossings.
Europeans and their governments are already daunted by the prospect of innocent economic migrants and asylum seekers turning up on their doorsteps from Africa and the near East. Many refugees in 1997 and 1998 were Iraqi or Turkish Kurds, who have been arriving in increasing numbers and applying for political asylum. EU countries are afraid things could get worse: recent years have seen sudden influxes from Albania and Bosnia; and the risk of mass migration from the countries of North Africa is ever present, particularly with Algeria virtually in a state of civil war.
But much more worrying are the activities of organized criminals who now make big money smuggling illegal immigrants, as well as the more traditional contraband of drugs, guns and money. According to Professor Ernesto Savona, director of Italy’s Transcrime research institute, the Albanian Mafia has now grown so powerful that it has already chased the Italian Mafia, once its patron and big brother, right out of the lucrative business of trafficking migrants. ‘Albanian-organized crime has its foot in the door, which is Italy, and this means people, prostitution and drugs.’1 It will be tough for EU countries to hold on to the Schengen ideal of free movement of people without more stringent immigration and asylum laws.
Expect Europe’s open-borders policy to come under a lot of pressure within the Schengen group, while the UK looks on smugly.
Immigration If you’re looking for a hot-button topic in Europe, immigration has long been a reliable choice and is likely to stay that way well into the next millennium. Recently deceased British politician Enoch Powell made his name thirty years ago with his notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech on immigration, while in France the National Front party of Jean-Marie Le Pen now commands around 15.2 per cent of French votes on an anti-immigrant platform of ‘France for the French’. It’s all about culture (with a small c), jobs, and welfare. The presence of immigrants who are really, seriously different can create huge culture shock, especially when they are there in large numbers and form their own self-contained communities. For instance, Germany, Europe’s biggest receiver of immigrants, has around 7 million immigrants out of a population of 82 million.
Every European country has its unique immigrant population profile – which itself begs the question of how many generations it takes for immigrants to be classified as locals. The UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands have people from their former colonies, Germany has Turks and Eastern Europeans, most northern European countries have people from southern Europe, and southern Europe, which used to lose migrants to the north, is now having to deal with the unaccustomed problem of absorbing immigrants from Africa and the Balkans. Apart from the smells of unfamiliar cooking and the sound of strange languages, the big fears are either that the immigrants will work, taking the jobs of local people and driving down pay levels, or that they won’t work but instead will live on benefit payments.
Slow-to-change communities are feeling the effects of the economic upheavals that are sweeping the world and devastating traditional industries, leaving legions of unemployed. It’s all too easy for bewildered Europeans to point the finger of blame at immigrants, who are often concentrated in areas where the hardest-hit local people live too. And it’s all too tempting for extremist parties to play on voters’ fears, forcing even moderate politicians to take a harder line on immigration.
For example, the left-wing government of French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin caused a furore among its own supporters as it examined residency requests from 140,000 illegal immigrants. The government is aiming to modify tough immigration regulations passed by previous conservative governments under pressure from the far-right National Front, which wants to send all immigrants home. Jospin’s new law is easier on immigrants who have French-born children or who have been in the country for many years, but is tougher on recent arrivals and bachelors.
All across Europe, governments will have a tough job balancing conflicting factors. On one hand, they wish to stay true to their humanitarian traditions and tackle the practical task of integrating new arrivals. And on the other hand, they are mindful of the risk of social conflict that is likely if they overstretch the capacity of local people to absorb newcomers.
So far, the immigration debate has been conducted largely in terms of rights and responsibilities, of economic burdens, of redistributing an economic cake that is assumed to be of fixed size. But in the early years of the coming millennium, we can expect to see the focus start to shift towards finding ways to help immigration contribute to the economies of receiving countries.
The fact is that Europe needs immigrants. Birth rates across Europe are low and the native populations of most European countries are ageing and shrinking. As people live longer and the demographic bulge of baby boomers starts heading towards retirement, Europe will increasingly need the work and the taxes of immigrants to keep its economies humming.
You Are What You Speak?
So, in much of Europe in the year 2000, you’ll be able to cross borders without noticing them and you’ll only need to carry one type of currency, the euro. But what language will you speak? More and more, it’s likely to be English. Increasing numbers of Europeans are deciding that if they have to invest time and effort in learning a second language, it may as well be one that can be used as widely as possible in Europe and beyond.
Like so much else in Europe, there is a precedent for Europeans sharing a common tongue, a lingua franca. For well over a thousand years, into the early centuries of the present millennium, educated people across the Continent spoke variants of Latin, the language imposed by the Romans. Modern French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan are direct descendants of Latin.
For much of the present millennium, Europeans spoke a huge variety of local dialects. It was only with the establishment of modern nation-states and public schooling that the idea of standardized national languages took hold, enabling people in different parts of the same country to communicate with each other. But the problem with language is that it’s not only a means of communication, it’s also a repository of national culture, identity and pride.
When the European Community was founded French was the predominant language until the UK joined in 1972, when English began to pose a threat. Since the admission of the Scandinavian countries in 1995, English has been even more widely used; an article in the Electronic Telegraph noted a recent survey of more than a billion pages of EU documents that confirmed that English has taken the lead. Although there are eleven official EU languages, European Commission meetings take place in just three tongues: English, French and German.
The smaller EU nations, such as the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, take it for granted that their languages are of domestic interest only. Even Italy and Spain apparently have no international aspirations for their languages. Not so Germany and France, where the national languages are seen as flagships of the national culture, to be promoted with government backing to stop the insidious slide towards English.
More than half the Germany foreign ministry’s cultural budget is devoted to promoting German language and culture abroad in 180 German schools with 2,200 teachers and specialists. Nearly 170 government-supported Goethe Institutes employ 750 people in seventy-eight countries to champion the cause.2
France takes its language very seriously indeed and is trying its best to stem the tide of English. It has a highly respected body, the Académie Française, to rule on correct usage, and has placed legal restrictions on the use of English in public communications.