ABSTRACT:
Also available from: the RAcism and XEnophobia Network (RAXEN) of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) of the European Union and the Centro de Estudios Internacionales in Buenos Aires.
While there is a never-ending debate on Islamism, Islamist terrorism and the identity of Europe vis-à-vis growing Muslim communities in Europe, there are hardly any solid cross-national data being presented on the real extent of the Islamist threat facing Europe, and on the social conditions that lead to Islamist radicalism. By and large, our rigorous quantitative results, based on the first systematic use of the Muslim community data contained in the “European Social Survey” all support a socio-liberal view of “migration” and “integration”, compatible with much of the rest of current European political economic thinking regarding the future alternatives for the European Union, and contradict the very extended current alarmist political discourse in Western Europe.
First we show with new data that the much hailed “European social model” is a myth, when you compare poverty rates in OECD countries and in Europe on the basis of absolute income data, and not just poverty lines in terms of national means. The more that absolute poverty grows in Western Europe, largely due to failed integration policies, and due to the fact that the European Union expands and takes in new members characterized by low average incomes and large scale poverty rates of their own, the old national and relative poverty lines (in terms of 60 % of the national median) become obsolete.
As large scale poverty of Europe’s Muslim communities threatens to grow, political radicalism might fall on a fertile ground. But we present materials, based on the ESS that give strong support to the hypothesis that passive support for Islamist radicalism in Europe and the complete distrust in democracy does not exceed 400.000 persons. We also compare our research results with the recent PEW data. By and large, the two datasets yield the same results. Regrettable as Islamist extremism in Europe might be, it is a far way from alarmist views that present “Islam” in Europe as such as being incompatible with the future of democracy.
We also find strong evidence that Muslim communities in Europe are not different from other religious communities in their tendency towards secularism. We also find that Muslim economic and social alienation in Europe very much corresponds to deficiencies of the implementation of the “Lisbon” process.
In this publication, we then draw some optimistic, socio-liberal conclusions about Islam in the world system. Countering some alarmist voices in the West, neither migration nor Muslim culture are to be blamed for the contemporary crisis, but the very nature of unequal capitalist accumulation and dependency that is at the core of the world capitalist system.
For one, our analysis is based on current thinking on Kondratiev waves of world political development inherent in recent work by IIASA and the NATO Institute for Advanced Studies. We also present analyses in the framework of the debate on cross-national determinants of human well-being in the world system. While we are cautiously optimistic about a socio-liberal, non-interventionist policy alternative, we come to the conclusion that present patterns of global governance, modeled around the neo-liberal Washington Consensus and American hyperpower, are doomed to failure.
In the second part of our analysis, we first present a rigorous re-analysis of United States Department of State data on acts of global terrorism in the framework of Kondratiev cycle waves. We then proceed to an analysis of the determinants of economic growth and ecological and social development in 140 nations with complete data.
