McTag wrote:A side issue:
I come from a society in the west of Scotland where there was a lot of Irish immigration. Those immigrants were predominantly Roman Catholic.
The catholic clergy demanded separate schooling for catholic children and to my mind this has deepened the problems in a divided society. Yes, there were Scottish catholics too, the original religion of course, at least from the days of St Columba. But to my mind, the deliberate division of schoolchildren has perpetuated the sectarian divide, which still festers today and is a blight on Scottish society.
This I think should inform our actions now, in relation to new waves of immigration.
To me, society works better when religion takes a back seat.
I dunno.
Perhaps the Netherlands provide something of a counter-example. Just talking off the cuff here, mind you ... :
The Netherlands, after Belgium had seceded, were left a country split between a large, mostly Protestant north and a now smaller, solidly catholic south. The Protestants had the power - both politically and economically, the Catholics were in a sort of second-rank citizen position. It was somewhere around that time that Catholic believers actually had to resort to "schuilkerken" - hidden churches, since openly visible ones were not tolerated.
The very idea of Dutch nationhood was entwined with protestantism - the royal family, for example, was 100% protestant until the middle of the 20th century. The first time a member of the royal family married a catholic, she was formally excluded and had to renounce all succession rights (and that was less than half a century ago).
By all accounts, the Netherlands could have developed into another Northern Ireland. The situation was complicated by a rising socialist, secular working-class movement in the cities and the north as well. Political and religious sectarianism was rife.
In such a situation, I guess theres roughly a few options available. Take the French route, and use massive pressure, violence where needed, to establish a unitary, assimilated nation, to eradicate, as much as possible, regional and minority cultures; turn the schools into a tool of enforced, unitary nationalisation. But dive into the history books on Brittany or the Provence to find out about the human and cultural costs of that. Slide down the Northern Irish road, where each sect bars itself in provinces and neighbourhoods of its own with armed force. Or - be pragmatic about it.
The Dutch have, until very recently, always been good about pragmatism. We did, all of us, catholics and protestants, still want to make money after all. Trade. For that, an at least functional national government was necessary. Whereas a national government strong enough to impose a French style nationalisation (and risk triggering sectarian violence in the process) was not feasible, to any pragmatic standard.
So the Dutch opted for the middle road. The state ensured order, territorial integrity, and the means to conduct profitable trade internationally. But what citizen groups chose to believe, think and do - how they chose to congregate, socialise and group together - was left to the groups.
The name of that compromise was "pillarisation". Protestants, Catholics, socialists and liberals constituted the four pillars among whom the social and cultural life of the country was subdivided. It went quite far. There were (and are) protestant, catholic and secular schools. There were (and are, though void of most meaning) protestant, catholic, socialist and liberal broadcasting associations who divvied up the broadcasting time on national public radio, then TV. There were also protestant, catholic, socialist and liberal newspapers, magazines, trade unions and protestant, catholic, socialist and liberal sportsclubs, nature lovers organisations, you name it.
Boundaries were drawn sharply: the priest threatened damnation to those who listened to the other pillar's radio station, and "inter-marriage" was rare and frowned upon ("two religions on a pillow, the devil sleeps between"). There was no pick-and-choose; you got the package deal (if you voted Labour, you read Het Parool or Het Vrije Volk, watched the VARA, sent your kids to a secular school, were a member of the NVV trade union, and went walking with the NIVON). And the whole division into spheres, guarded by social control, was safeguarded by law. By ways of extreme example, a law guaranteed Catholic, Protestant and secular schools equal funds, which led to the bizarre, much-quoted situation that if a window broke and needed to be repaired in the catholic school, the protestant and secular school in the village were paid the same amount.
Stifling? Yes, it was, and in the sixties the whole building came crashing down, and the pillars have since been mostly ground to rubble. But did it serve a function? Yeah it did. It served to pacify a country that could easily also have fragmented or slid into violence. But beyond that, and more to the point, it enabled marginalised groups to emancipate themselves, to gain and establish their own, respected place in society, and through that, to come to see themselves as natural constituent part of the overall country/nation.
Take the Catholics and the socialists. It was no surprise that these two groups were most solid in their self-organisation and delimitation from the other groups; the most vigilant in policing those social boundaries. It was, after all, also a form of self-defence. Self-defence in a society that, if the French route had been chosen, would have been forced to collectively conform to the protestantism of the leading class and the royal family. It was they who were long and fiercely scorned and distrusted as "foreign agents" who worked for Rome or revolution, respectively; who were suspected to be ever ready to betray the country.
Once pillarisation was truly established, they were safe. They needed fear no more being chased out or forced underground. Hell, they became equal receptors of subsidies! This had two effects. First, it empowered these previously marginalised communities. They became stronger, more confident and more prosperous. Secondly, in the process, they had ever less reason to turn their back to the Dutch society/state altogether.
These groups, by being granted the opportunity to emancipate within a domain of their own, legally safeguarded by the state as one of four diverse communities that made up the state as a whole, were also basically
co-opted. The Netherlands saw very little class strife, for example, compared to France or Germany. Few riots and rebellions. All the rebellious energy focused on organising and improving one's lot was instead channeled into the formal organisations that were allowed, even safeguarded by the state - and which thus naturally became reformist rather than revolutionary or secessionist. They also arguably succeeded better in improving the economic lot of the urban working class, than their extra-systemic counterparts in other European countries.
This historical background is one of the reasons why the Christian-Democrats in Holland, tho clearly a right-wing party, were long, largely defenders of the islamic schools that have sprung up in the Netherlands in the last decade. Why deny them the same right that had emancipated the Catholics? It had
worked for the Catholics, after all.
It is also much of the reason why "Education in Own Language and Culture" for immigrants was long state-sponsored in the Netherlands. Be comfortable and knowledgeable about your own culture, background, and you'll all the better function within the overall national society, is the logic learnt from the history of pillarisation.
And anecdotal evidence does suggest thare is actually definitely something to that. The (real and would-be) Islamist terrorists that have been arrested in the Netherlands the last couple of years have often turned out to be youths who actually had gotten quite little about their religion and culture from parents who, first generation immigrants, were both scarcely educated themselves and instinctually inclined to humbly hide or conform, rather than proudly pass on their cultural heritage. They grew up seeing their parents humilated as low-paid, discriminated workers, who never protested, always just tried to not stand out, and got to see them as weak. They decided to be more assertive themselves - but had little actual knowledge of Islam or their parents' national culture to base any teenage rebellion on. They often spoke their parents' language badly, and were thus alienated from the established mosques their parents went to, where sermons were in Arabic and the attitude was conservative and authoritarian, lacking all outreach. So instead, they went looking on the Internet and, ill-informed as they were, were ill-prepared to weigh the claims of the extremist pied pipers that addressed them there. And so they fell into the hands of radical Islamist international groups.
There is a case to be made, there, that if there had been well-educated, articulate, Dutch-speaking imams who reached out to these second-generation youths, if they had gone, perhaps, to islamic-Dutch schools where they'd been taught some proper history and confidence in their Islamic identity, they would never have gone along with such extremist dilettants, out to recruit terrorists.
Get chips-for-brains to help you next time. 