4 Contemporary European liberalism Exclusionary, enlightened or romantic? Gina Gustavsson Introduction What is the state of contemporary European liberalism? According to an emergent literature on immigration and ethnic relations, this question has become increasingly difficult to disentangle from the heated debate over how to handle the growing presence of Islam in Europe. Consider, for example, the wave of veil bans and mandatory citizenship tests for immigrants that swept across Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As we will see later in this chapter, many of these measures promote a shared European identity of liberalism, rather than a specifically national one (Joppke 2004, 2007). Indeed, the largely secular majority seem to experience the growing Muslim immigrant minority as a threat not only to their national identity as French, English or German, but also, conspicuously, to their ideological identity as liberals (Sniderman et al. 2004; Sniderman and Hagendoorn 2007; Adamson et al. 2011; Triadafilopoulos 2011). This is the background against which contemporary European liberalism must be understood. This chapter takes a closer look at what is often described as a repressive turn in European liberalism, a turn towards a tougher, exclusionary liberalism that is generally believed to have its roots in the Enlightenment liberalism of Immanuel Kant. The turbulent beginning of the twenty-first century has placed these concerns at the top of the agenda for European politicians, intellectuals and citizens alike. In March 2004, Europe experienced its first large-scale Islamist terrorist attack along the lines of 9/11: the Madrid train bombings. In the same month, the French affaire du foulard, which had been heatedly debated for over a decade, culminated in a legal ban on wearing the Muslim headscarf and other conspicuous religious symbols in public schools. Later that year, Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker and vehement critic of Islam, was murdered by a Muslim fundamentalist in an Amsterdam street – and before the year was out, the Dutch populist Geert Wilders had founded the new self-avowedly liberal Freedom Party, which advocates the banning of the Quran and the Muslim veil in the name of liberty. In the subsequent year, 2005, Islamist terror struck London. A few months later, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad; according to the 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3EEE 4 5 6 7 8111 9EEEE 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 35 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8EEE 75 6277 HBK EURO POLITICS-Part 1_246x174 mm 01/07/2014 16:12 Page 75 1ST PROOFS NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION