Muslim Europe

“Europe’s Muslim Street” by Omer Taspinar, in Foreign Policy (Mar.–Apr. 2003), 1779 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

Europe’s reluctance to join the U.S.-led war against Iraq reflected more than a different orientation toward power. Europe has a much stronger Muslim constituency than the United States, observes Taspinar, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy: “The 15 million Muslims of the European Union—up to three times as many as live in the United States—are becoming a more powerful political force than the fabled Arab street.” That France and Germany alone have nearly 10 million Muslims and only 700,000 Jews helps to explain Europe’s different perspective on the Middle East.

Muslims in Europe have seen their clout increase with their growing enfranchisement. Nearly half of the five to seven million Mus­lims in France (population: 61.4 million) are already citizens. Germany, which began grant­ing citizenship on the basis of birth rather than ancestry in 2000, counts a half-million Mus­lims among its 82 million citizens, and is adding 160,000 a year. Newly enfranchised “German Turks” gave the incumbent Social Democrat-Green coalition vital support in last Septem­ber’s close election.

Turks, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, and Pakistanis came to Europe as invited “guest workers” during the 1950s and 1960s, when European countries wanted to ease their postwar labor shortage. But when recession hit in the 1970s, the workers stayed, often joined by their families. Today, Taspi­nar notes, the Muslim birth rate is three times the non-Muslim rate. By 2015, if current trends continue, the Muslim population in Europe is expected to double, while the non-Muslim population is projected to shrink by 3.5 percent.

“Whether Brussels, Berlin, Paris, or Wash­ington likes it or not,” concludes Taspinar, “Europe’s Muslim constituencies are likely to become an even more vocal foreign-policy lobby.”