The ritual slaughter of animals has become the last of many areas of contention that are changing the shape of our public domains. The way in which Islamophobia is becoming a part of our public ‘common sense’ has complex knock-on effects, not least for our Jewish minorities.
Europe’s civilizing mission is humanitarian - its duty to intervene to spread the good word, protecting the oppressed against local tyrants. The conditions by which this protection is granted are always dictated by the protector and never the protégé. Though this is not said, it is a given.
Nobody has raised real debates in national or supranational parliaments to discuss the excesses of the securitarian discourse. Quite the opposite: the left has adopted the security discourse wholesale as its own and entered into a kind of auction with the right.
Centre-right parties across Europe are announcing the failure of multiculturalism. We are witnessing a co-ordinated revival of Enoch Powell's idea of the aggressive outsider out to dominate the rest; only now race and immigration are being played out on the terrain of culture and religion
Right-wing populist parties tend to be anti-multinational and anti-intellectual: they endorse nationalistic, nativist, and chauvinistic beliefs, embedded - explicitly or coded - in common sense appeals to a presupposed shared knowledge of ‘the people’.
Europe’s leaders are reversing their historically generous role in assisting countries out of criminality and fascism. What we are seeing now therefore strikes at the heart of the European project not just the euro.
Why is widespread social anxiety fuelling xenophobia rather than criticism of neoliberal capitalism? What role has the state played? Have we arrived at the paradoxical situation where the best we can do is to call on the state to do its job?
Does Europe offer a model for a solution to xenophobia, or is it a major part of the problem; or is it just in a much more confused place altogether?
Bardo and Ophelia at the triumphal arch: will the censored verses of Hamlet reveal to us who killed the poet? An extract from the new novel by Luis de Miranda
The emergence of a fresh current on Europe's political right, typified by figures such as Geert Wilders, is being widely discussed. But historically informed scrutiny suggests a different view, says Cas Mudde.
For France, acting in a ‘humanitarian’ manner means intervening in Libya’s civil war but does not extend to freely accepting refugees from Libya or Tunisia within its borders.
We all know what our politicians think of Muslim women who wear the veil. But the women themselves are rarely asked to explain their decision. Now, as the veil is banned in France, a report is published giving 32 Muslim women in that country a chance to defend their choice.
