Is Macron anti-Muslim or is he just looking for votes?

A view has taken hold among sections of Europe’s governing class to the effect that the distinction between Europe and Asia is increasingly blurred and that this tendency is to be encouraged to the advantage of all.

Emmanuel Macron does not share this view. The French President has no wish to see the emergence, or re-emergence, of Eurasia, with its echoes of the Ottoman empire. Rather, he appears to share the view, held by, among others, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban, that what would once have been described as Christian Europe must be preserved and protected as a cultural entity, with a history and traditions that are distinct from those of Islam.

Specifically, Macron has vetoed talks aimed, long-term, at bringing Turkey, with its 80-million-strong Muslim population, into the European Union. But he is also against the admission of Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and what is now North Macedonia, respectively, 60 per cent, 51 per cent and 35 per cent Muslim.

The problem he faces as he attempts to justify his opposition is twofold.

First, Islam in Europe is a fact, not just historically but in the present day. There are an estimated 50 million Muslims in Europe, including nine million Turks. Most are assimilated, or assimilating, meaning that they cause no trouble and wish simply to live their lives as ordinary citizens of the countries they now call home. That number will rise, perhaps to one hundred million over the next 50 years, making Muslims in all likelihood the continent’s second-biggest religious grouping.

An encouraging example of assimilation in action can regularly be seen and heard on Question Time on the BBC, in which it has become routine for British Muslims, including women wearing headscarves and niqabs, to take part in the televised debate not as practitioners of their faith, but as Conservatives, Socialists, even Scottish Nationalists – in other words, as citizens, not emissaries. The idea of Muslims as enemies of the state, keen to replace the cross with the crescent is wildly over-stated.

Macron’s other problem, closely linked to the first, is the attitude of European liberals who, while deploring Islamist terrorism, are keen to promote an idealised Europe in which all prejudice is swept aside and no one set of beliefs is better than any other.

If we were to believe the revisionist intepretation of history, everything that predates Channel 4 is fair game. The ancient Greeks, the Roman Empire, gothic architecture, the wars of religion, the great voyages of discovery, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, competing empires, the scramble for Africa, the two world wars and the European Union are all just water under the bridge. It is time for a new beginning and we must move forward with nothing but love in our hearts.

The alternative assessment is that Europe – regardless of how you may choose to view its cultural or scientific achievement, alongside the undoubted evils of empire, slavery and the Nazis – is a distinct and distinctive place, with an integrated history rooted in what was until recently its foundational Christian faith. To deny this is surely to engage in fake history and alternative “facts”.

An important part of Europe’s history – and one which ultimately reinforces its sense of self – was the clash of civilisations that was the long war between Christian Europe and the Ottomans.

The Ottoman Empire, a military expression of one form of Islam, spent much blood and treasure in its quest to defeat Christian Europe and make it part of a renewed caliphate similar to that which had dominated Spain until the Reconquista. The capture of Constantinople in 1453 represented the high-point of this audacious scheme, but the dream did not fade until the failed Siege of Vienna in 1529, in which the army of Suleiman the Magnificent was repelled by forces loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Even then, Turkey retained its suzerainty over the Balkans and Greece, as well as Cyprus, well into the nineteenth century. In the case of Bulgaria, the de jure rule of the “Sublime Port” was not finally overthrown until 1908.

Macron makes no reference to any of this. He claims that his objections to any early admission of Albania, Bosnia and North Macedonia into the EU are purely procedural. Yet it is clear that his definition of where Europe ends corresponds pretty well exactly to the historic boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. The real question then becomes, is his position reasonable, grounded in historical experience, or is it a simple mark of prejudice?

As far as what is “reasonable” is concerned, the following should probably be kept in mind: while there are millions of Muslims in Europe, with more arriving every day, there are hardly any Europeans living freely, as citizens, in the Muslim world. Christians in Muslim countries are tolerated at best and must be careful not to offend local religious sensibilities. Mosques are a commonplace throughout Europe, even within sight of the Vatican. But churches, unless of ancient origin, are banned in most Islamic states. Only one new church has been approved in Turkey during the period of President Recep Erdogan’s rule, and it is to be built two miles outside the city boundary of Istanbul. Erdogan himself is a devout Muslim, whose declared mission has been to reverse the secularisation of his country first introduced by Kemal Ataturk.

In Algeria, which once claimed a Catholic community numbering more than one million, there are now estimated to be no more that 45,000 Catholics served by a total of eight churches, the most recently contructed being the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, in Algiers, completed in 1956 before the French withdrawal.

So is tolerance and multiculturalism a one-way street? Many “white-native” Europeans would say that it is. In the UK, the existence of Muslim grooming gangs preying on young white girls, whom they dismissed as of no religious value, led to a wave of popular resentment. The same was true in Germany in the aftermath of a spate of sexual assaults by Muslim men that followed the admission of one million asylum-seekers, most of them from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, in 2015. In France, Islamist attacks, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians, boosted the support given to the National Front (now the National Rally) led by the far-right Marine Le Pen.

According to Bruno Maçaes, a former Portuguese minister for Europe and author of The Dawn of Eurasia, writing this week in the Financial Times, Macron’s views on EU enlargement to the East are driven by domestic politics in advance of an upcoming round of local elections.

“Macron,” he writes, “is not a vulgar Islamophobe – there are many in France who are – but he seems increasingly convinced that Europe is in danger of being absorbed by Islam and thus needs to close the door to Turkey, “dangerous” Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania and North Macedonia and cozy up to Christian Russia. He certainly seems reluctant to admit a Muslim voice and a Muslim veto into the exclusive rooms of the European Council.”

Maçaes is in no doubt where he stands. “Alas, Islamophobia, no matter how philosophical, cultured or strategic, is still just Islamophobia.”