Politicus: Issue of Arab Spring Migrants to Cast Shadow on G-8 Talks

LONDON — When the leaders of the Group of 8 meet next week — among them, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy — one of their official concerns will be supporting attempts to make democracy emerge in some kind of recognizable form from the Arab revolts in countries like Tunisia and Libya.

Unofficially, and perhaps even without public mention at the summit meeting in the French resort town of Deauville, that helping hand also means providing sufficient economic incentive to hold off a wave of Arab migration toward Europe. The potential human flood gets described by the apocalyptically minded as “biblical.”

Of course, no one in Deauville would talk in those terms. But a European diplomat has acknowledged that there is more than a tacit link between sustaining the process of change in North Africa and avoiding a flow of refugees to the four European Union countries (including Italy) that make up the G-8 alongside the United States, Canada, Japan and Russia.

Sounding irritated, António Guterres, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, has spoken of a “grudging ” response from Europe, described as largely interested in “how to keep out” people trying to seek shelter on the other side of the Mediterranean.

But reality doesn’t sit still. What is changing now is that none of the heads of the four big Western countries at Deauville in 2011 can avoid immigration as a domestic/international political issue that carries with it the emotional vote-getting-or-vote-losing volatility of war or taxes.

For example: Mr. Obama last week traveled to near the Mexican border to insist he’s cracking down hard on illegal immigration. The New York Times wrote that this was the president’s fifth immigration-linked event in the last four weeks.

In parallel, signs are emerging of left-of-center politicians’ acknowledgment of the legitimacy of European voters’ concerns about how their lives are affected by the failed integration of many Muslim immigrants.

Here was Ségolène Royal, who ran as the French Socialist Party’s candidate against Mr. Sarkozy in 2007 and seeks its 2012 presidential nomination, saying last week that no one entering France because of the Arab world’s turmoil should think they’re “destined” to remain in the country.

Why? Because Ms. Royal obviously regards that saying “no” on the issue means votes in an eventual party primary. She argues that exceptions must not be made to the principle of rejecting all illegal immigration. This sounds like support for efforts by some European Union member governments to tighten the open border-passage provisions of the community’s internal controls.

To boot, Ms. Royal was reported telling residents of French immigrant neighborhoods, “Stop complaining.”

In Britain, Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party, which has a hard-edged take on immigration, fared very well in local elections in England a couple of weeks ago in spite of its austerity budgets and undistinguished economic results.

The prime minister had been attacked on immigration from inside his governing coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Vince Cable, one of the party’s cabinet members, chastised Mr. Cameron for his pronouncement of the death of multiculturalism in Britain and his more recent promise to sharply cut non-European immigration.

The cabinet minister accused the prime minister of “inflaming” Islamic extremism in the process. But the voting went badly for the Lib Dems — not the Conservatives.

Mr. Cameron explained he was fighting the idea that “concern about immigration is somehow racist.” Saying nothing, he argued, created room for the real bigots in extremist parties.

He spoke of immigrants who “on occasion” were unwilling to integrate, and who created “discomfort and disjointedness in some neighborhoods.”

That’s a long way from the language of being invaded, swamped or made to feel an alien in your own country. But Mr. Cameron insisted at the same time that it would be “untruthful” and “unfair” not to address a real problem.

A reflexive equation linking concern about immigration with reactionary thinking has been dulled in Europe, but not without embarrassment. In a clumsy attempt to cozy up to its wavering white working-class constituency, the German Social Democratic Party leadership voted last month not to expel Thilo Sarrazin, a party member who wrote a best seller, larded with genetics-based arguments, designating Muslim immigrants as a drag on German society.

Yet for parts of the European left, a serious question exists about a way to move closer to the immigration themes it once rejected as reflecting bigotry.

In France, how could the Socialist Party not consider them in a presidential campaign landscape where both Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen, the head of the extreme right National Front, talk tough about immigration’s downsides?

Recent polling by Harris Interactive provides the answer: 76 percent of the French (including 62 percent of left-wing voters) think that immigrants don’t make sufficient effort to integrate into French society. Speaking for the polling group, J.D. Levy told a French reporter that while the events of the Arab Spring were presented positively by the media, “most people were mainly worried” that they would mean “even more potential immigrants.”

A strategy paper on how to win in 2012 drawn up by supporters of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the strongest Socialist Party candidate before his arrest on sexual assault charges in New York, suggests a successful campaign must include a focus on the value of work and the secular character of French society, while emphasizing citizens’ duties — a kind of nudge-nudge message to voters that the party understands their worries about Muslim immigration.

To leap ahead of the nudge and wink stage, Gaullist party sources have told me that Mr. Sarkozy no longer wants to talk of immigrants’ integration but promote their “assimilation.”

That’s always been a loaded word. Currently, it is used by Islamists in Britain to paint Mr. Cameron’s rejection of multiculturalism as an assimilation plan robbing Muslim immigrants of their Islamic identity.

Surely, at Deauville there will be no desire on the part of the summiteers to wade into such a contentious bog.

But there is the real likelihood that the summit meeting plays a role, even unspoken, in accompanying a palpable change in the politics and discussion of immigration and its intensifying impact.

View the original article here

Politicus: Issue of Arab Spring Migrants to Cast Shadow on G-8 Talks

LONDON — When the leaders of the Group of 8 meet next week — among them, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy — one of their official concerns will be supporting attempts to make democracy emerge in some kind of recognizable form from the Arab revolts in countries like Tunisia and Libya.

Unofficially, and perhaps even without public mention at the summit meeting in the French resort town of Deauville, that helping hand also means providing sufficient economic incentive to hold off a wave of Arab migration toward Europe. The potential human flood gets described by the apocalyptically minded as “biblical.”

Of course, no one in Deauville would talk in those terms. But a European diplomat has acknowledged that there is more than a tacit link between sustaining the process of change in North Africa and avoiding a flow of refugees to the four European Union countries (including Italy) that make up the G-8 alongside the United States, Canada, Japan and Russia.

Sounding irritated, António Guterres, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, has spoken of a “grudging ” response from Europe, described as largely interested in “how to keep out” people trying to seek shelter on the other side of the Mediterranean.

But reality doesn’t sit still. What is changing now is that none of the heads of the four big Western countries at Deauville in 2011 can avoid immigration as a domestic/international political issue that carries with it the emotional vote-getting-or-vote-losing volatility of war or taxes.

For example: Mr. Obama last week traveled to near the Mexican border to insist he’s cracking down hard on illegal immigration. The New York Times wrote that this was the president’s fifth immigration-linked event in the last four weeks.

In parallel, signs are emerging of left-of-center politicians’ acknowledgment of the legitimacy of European voters’ concerns about how their lives are affected by the failed integration of many Muslim immigrants.

Here was Ségolène Royal, who ran as the French Socialist Party’s candidate against Mr. Sarkozy in 2007 and seeks its 2012 presidential nomination, saying last week that no one entering France because of the Arab world’s turmoil should think they’re “destined” to remain in the country.

Why? Because Ms. Royal obviously regards that saying “no” on the issue means votes in an eventual party primary. She argues that exceptions must not be made to the principle of rejecting all illegal immigration. This sounds like support for efforts by some European Union member governments to tighten the open border-passage provisions of the community’s internal controls.

To boot, Ms. Royal was reported telling residents of French immigrant neighborhoods, “Stop complaining.”

In Britain, Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party, which has a hard-edged take on immigration, fared very well in local elections in England a couple of weeks ago in spite of its austerity budgets and undistinguished economic results.

The prime minister had been attacked on immigration from inside his governing coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Vince Cable, one of the party’s cabinet members, chastised Mr. Cameron for his pronouncement of the death of multiculturalism in Britain and his more recent promise to sharply cut non-European immigration.

The cabinet minister accused the prime minister of “inflaming” Islamic extremism in the process. But the voting went badly for the Lib Dems — not the Conservatives.

Mr. Cameron explained he was fighting the idea that “concern about immigration is somehow racist.” Saying nothing, he argued, created room for the real bigots in extremist parties.

He spoke of immigrants who “on occasion” were unwilling to integrate, and who created “discomfort and disjointedness in some neighborhoods.”

That’s a long way from the language of being invaded, swamped or made to feel an alien in your own country. But Mr. Cameron insisted at the same time that it would be “untruthful” and “unfair” not to address a real problem.

A reflexive equation linking concern about immigration with reactionary thinking has been dulled in Europe, but not without embarrassment. In a clumsy attempt to cozy up to its wavering white working-class constituency, the German Social Democratic Party leadership voted last month not to expel Thilo Sarrazin, a party member who wrote a best seller, larded with genetics-based arguments, designating Muslim immigrants as a drag on German society.

Yet for parts of the European left, a serious question exists about a way to move closer to the immigration themes it once rejected as reflecting bigotry.

In France, how could the Socialist Party not consider them in a presidential campaign landscape where both Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen, the head of the extreme right National Front, talk tough about immigration’s downsides?

Recent polling by Harris Interactive provides the answer: 76 percent of the French (including 62 percent of left-wing voters) think that immigrants don’t make sufficient effort to integrate into French society. Speaking for the polling group, J.D. Levy told a French reporter that while the events of the Arab Spring were presented positively by the media, “most people were mainly worried” that they would mean “even more potential immigrants.”

A strategy paper on how to win in 2012 drawn up by supporters of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the strongest Socialist Party candidate before his arrest on sexual assault charges in New York, suggests a successful campaign must include a focus on the value of work and the secular character of French society, while emphasizing citizens’ duties — a kind of nudge-nudge message to voters that the party understands their worries about Muslim immigration.

To leap ahead of the nudge and wink stage, Gaullist party sources have told me that Mr. Sarkozy no longer wants to talk of immigrants’ integration but promote their “assimilation.”

That’s always been a loaded word. Currently, it is used by Islamists in Britain to paint Mr. Cameron’s rejection of multiculturalism as an assimilation plan robbing Muslim immigrants of their Islamic identity.

Surely, at Deauville there will be no desire on the part of the summiteers to wade into such a contentious bog.

But there is the real likelihood that the summit meeting plays a role, even unspoken, in accompanying a palpable change in the politics and discussion of immigration and its intensifying impact.

View the original article here

Politicus: For Obama, a Victory but Little Clarity

PARIS — In proclaiming the elimination of Osama bin Laden a victory for “the greatness” of America (and by obvious extension that of his own leadership), Barack Obama hopes to create an image of forcefulness for his foreign policy — and at the same time assure his re-election next year.

Consider this language: Killing Bin Laden “is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people.” And, “As a nation, there is nothing we can’t do.”

Add to that, “We will never tolerate our security being threatened.” Plus, “We will be true to the values that make us who we are” and “relentless in the defense of our citizens and our friends and allies.”

Call it a presidential volley of star-spangled rhetoric, including 10 I’s, a me and a my in Sunday night’s 11-minute got-him announcement, followed up by a trip Thursday to New York and the ground zero of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America.

While that sounds a lot like flag-wrapped, and probably effective, pre-campaign politicking, the raid leading to Bin Laden’s death takes a stone off the country’s heart. Mr. Obama, with seemingly justified pride and moral legitimacy, could well say (and did) — although the International Federation for Human Rights in Paris finds the operation’s legality open to question — “Justice has been done.”

But this is also a long way from the diction of a candidate who ran for the White House in 2008 with the phrase “we’re no longer about bluster and unilateralism and ideology,” and the suggestion that the United States’ potential for worldwide reach and military commitment has ever-increasing limits.

Now, Mr. Obama is pitching We’re No. 1 to a country that, as Bill Clinton said, “hires you to win” — its Iraq intervention being regarded mostly as a fiasco, but one where the 2007-8 U.S. military surge avoided a dishonorable departure.

Yet this America has no other victories in sight that would rid North Africa of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, or Afghanistan of the Taliban, and everyone else of the departed terrorist-in-chief’s globally dispersed followers.

That’s a contradiction likely to become more evident without changes in American caveats on the extent of U.S. intervention in Libya — a rebel military spokesman said on Monday, “We want America to do the same to Qaddafi” that it did to Bin Laden — or a modification of the Obama administration plan for a troop drawdown this year in Afghanistan.

Just how does the administration and the president’s America of Victory handle the realities of an “Arab Spring” including a Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, likely to share power in a new government, agreeing with Iran this week that Bin Laden’s death means the United States of America has no more excuses for the presence of its troops in the Middle East?

Or the implications of a future Palestinian state, based on the recent reconciliation between the Palestine Liberation Organization government and Hamas, whose prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, reacting to the American raid on Bin Laden’s hide-out, said: “We condemn the assassination of an Arab holy warrior. We regard this as a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and the shedding of Muslim and Arab blood.”

Could the administration argue, while trumpeting an American triumph under Mr. Obama’s command, that it expects, through patience and great understanding, to win sudden moderation from interlocutors whose identity (and appeal) continues to be based on contempt for America’s goals and its support of Israel?

In terms of political tactics, Mr. Obama seems to be trying to replicate a successful element of his 2008 election campaign. Back then, after basing his message early in the year on calls for withdrawal from Iraq, he moved increasingly from left to center on foreign policy as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s candidacy gained strength. After his nomination, the tougher line was maintained through November.

In a final television debate, looking at a flabbergasted John McCain, Mr. Obama described the military surge in Iraq of 20,000 additional troops — which he had opposed — as “succeeding beyond our wildest dreams.” During the same period, he called the specter of Iran achieving nuclear weapons capability “unacceptable,” and said he would do “everything, everything” (get it, get it?) to stop it as president.

Once in the Oval Office, Mr. Obama instead extended America’s open hand to Iran without any palpable success. He made a major speech in Cairo, read by some as an apology by the United States to Muslims for Bush administration policy rather than a call for the Arab world’s democratization. It was followed by a second major address in Moscow, seen by critics as portraying the Cold War as a neutral event and ignoring America and its European friends’ victory over the Soviet Union.

Late last year, readers of Bob Woodward’s “Obama’s Wars” were struck by a response from the president to the author’s question, concerning Afghanistan, if he could tolerate losing a war. Mr. Obama’s answer was, “I think about it not so much in the classic [manner], do you lose a war on my watch?”

Getting the president’s slant on how America can or should come out a winner in relation to the Arab world’s turmoil has not been easy.

According to the Woodward book, after the president’s Muslim outreach speech in Cairo, Gen. James L. Jones, who has since resigned as Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, set the writer straight — while totally contradicting his boss — on the reality of the fight against international terrorism. General Jones said: “It’s certainly a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash of religions. It’s a clash of almost how to live.”

Now, although not in relation to the price of gas in the United States, or to the country’s wobbling economic recovery, Mr. Obama has found an event he wants to make his presidency’s hallmark of American resolve.

But that’s hard. Considering the possibility of new terrorist atrocities, Mr. Obama’s choice to make a tough-minded American success his own key to re-election might not have more than a few weeks or months of shelf life.

If a victory’s proclamation brings vast satisfaction, America’s feat in taking down Osama bin Laden comes with little clarity about how the Obama administration plans to achieve new strategic triumphs.