Fukuyama on Europe's Growing Muslim 'Problem'

Francis Fukuyama, recently in the news for more or less renouncing his neoconservative roots insofar as American foreign policy is concerned, is one of the great thinkers of our time. Writing for Slate, he reviews several books by American authors, among them the scummy Pat Buchanan, that offers Europe advice on how to deal with its growing Muslim "problem."

Fukuyama concludes that

Unfortunately, anyone looking for more specific prescriptions from America—where, after all, assimilation has a long history—will find more sound and fury than useful insights.

And then offers his own:

The problem that most Europeans face today is that they don't have a vision of the kinds of positive cultural values their societies stand for and should promote, other than endless tolerance and moral relativism. What each European society needs is to invent an open form of national identity similar to the American creed, an identity that is accessible to newcomers regardless of ethnicity or religion. . . . Muslims coming to Europe would be minimally expected to accept this perspective as their own. . . .

Time is getting short to address these questions. Europeans should have started a discussion about how to integrate their Muslim minorities a generation ago, before the winds of radical Islamism had started to blow. The cartoon controversy, while beginning with a commendable European desire to assert basic liberal values, may constitute a Rubicon that will be very hard to re-cross. We should be alarmed at the scope of the problem, but prudent in responding to it, since escalating cultural conflict throughout the Continent will bring us closer to a showdown between Islamists and secularists that will increasingly look like a clash of civilizations.