We tend to be confusing xenophobia today with something that we used to know. Nativism in the United States has historically been associated with quotas and resistance against Chinese labor and rules for different types of graduated rights and lack of access to citizenship for certain groups. Old fashioned American nativism has stressed competition in the labor market or in housing, seeing nativism as a response to the exposure to competition from migrants during economic downturns.

What is remarkable about xenophobia in Europe today is that the labor market goes down, xenophobia grows, the economy and the labor market improves, xenophobia grows. In other words, the old link between economic competition and resistance against immigrants is really not what is informing xenophobia in Europe today. I would argue, borrowing from Ernest Gellner, that xenophobia is just a nationalist restoration project. It’s a program for amnesia. It’s a falsification program about what you originally were. It creates a myth. Nationalism is what we get when there really are no nations in the organic sense left. This xenophobic version of the “pure” Dane and the “pure” Dutchman and the culturalist idea of the nation is also clearly an idea that runs up against reality, to put it mildly. It is a romantic notion, a fallacy, a past that never was. It’s a program for purification at a time when it’s already too late.

The interesting part about xenophobia and the way it has worked politically is that in the 1970s, we used to have right-wing parties in Europe that were anti-tax, anti-welfare state. Those are gone. The welfare state, economic policy, is an area of consensus now. What we have instead is that, over the last 25 years, no far-right party has succeeded without integrating anti-immigrant sentiments. It has completely revamped the political landscape. In most places in Europe, (not so much in France or the UK, where the electoral system is different) the small voter, the motor on the move, really determines what happens. In other words, we have a situation where the fringe has pushed the center. That has led to an evacuation at the center. So I am blaming two variables so to speak for the leadership failure that Seyla was talking about. One is that there is no competition between Left and Right any more about the European project and economic policy. So what’s left to compete on is national issues. The second reason is that voters are increasingly not attached to the old parties any more, which means that from election to election you compete on what there is to compete on, and that happens to be anti-immigrant sentiments.

It has already been said and is true that many of the xenophobic sentiments that we hear today recycle a lot of the old tropes. Certainly in Protestant Northern Europe, a lot of what is being said about Muslims is remarkably similar to what Protestants have always said about Catholics: that they’re disloyal, that you can’t count on them to put the secular ahead of the sacred, that they are fifth column because they run to the orders of the Qur’an or the Pope. These are, as Ian correctly said, are sentiments that have been lying dormant. But what is remarkable, and I think very frightening to many of us, is the extent to which they have been allowed to resurge.

Ten years ago, I was inspired by Samuel Huntington to write a book. I couldn’t handle writing about the right wing, so I decided to go out and interview Muslims in leadership positions and what they actually thought the problem was for Muslims in the West. One of the things that was extraordinarily interesting in my interviews with Muslim parliamentarians and city counselors in some of Europe’s largest cities, was that they pretty much said the same thing everybody else was saying: that Muslims needed to integrate, that they needed to learn the language and change their religious habits, obey the rules and norms of the country they lived in. They should get jobs and stop controlling their women. To such a remarkable extent that many actually told me that they were in favor of the tightening of family unification regulations that were at that time being discussed, because they believed that one of the biggest impediments for Muslim integration was the practice of marrying cousins and having brides come from the country of origin. This meant that within families the native tongue was primarily spoken. They thought it an impediment to educational success. All of these were issues that everyone else also was talking about.

There was pretty much a consensus on what needed to be done. I do not think that one can say that putting restrictions on immigration should always be labeled xenophobic. What I do object to is the vilification of people and the stereotyping. What happened was that the decision to start to put restrictions on immigration turned into clobbering of Muslims. Because if you want to restrict immigration you have a problem, because you have to tell people who have not yet come that they’re not really welcome. How do you do that? You do that by making life very difficult for the people who are already in the country. That’s exactly what the Dutch and the Danes did. In those years, the Dutch and the Danes had a very nice game going where they really watched each other to see how far they could go. They waited to see what the courts would say. What would the European Court of Human Rights say? What would the EU say? What would the UN say? And actually in all of those instances, all of those processes started wagging their fingers at the Danes and the Dutch. Those restrictive policies created an absolute no-win situation for Muslims. It didn’t matter what Muslims did. If you integrated, you went to school and left the segregated households, decided you were going to belong and started raising money to build a mosque with money from the community rather than getting money from Saudi Arabia, you still met with resistance. On the other hand, if you stayed in the segregated communities, within the walls, well, then you wouldn’t integrate. It became a Catch-22. The restrictive policies stimulated the xenophobic rhetoric rather than curbing it.

However, what no one anticipated was that it probably worked. I have some numbers, and please forgive me for citing statistics. But the Dutch actually for the first time this spring decided that the future with respect to integration and toleration looked brighter. It was 54% of people still believe that the Netherlands is losing its identity, but they blame the European Union and the Euro in particular. 56% believed there was too much negativity about immigrants. Among the Danes – and I’m speaking about the Dutch and the Danes, because they really were at the forefront of this xenophobic movement – the Danes had really record high numbers. In 1990, 53% of Danes said that they would very much prefer Danes over foreigners. Today only 25% say they prefer Danes over foreigners. For the first time this year, the Danish People’s Party lost an election.

Now imagine you have a political party in a system where 2 or 3% votes to determine who gets to control the government, as is the case in many countries in Europe where you have proportional representation, and one party that election cycle after election cycle only goes up. This sends a very powerful message to everybody else in the system. This is exactly what happened. The Danish People’s Party became the third largest party in the country, did for three election cycles support very restrictive legislation. And the government did serve at the mercy of the Danish People’s Party. Even though the party at that time controlled no more than 13% and then 14% of the vote, it had an oversized influence on public policy. But today, there is such a thing as growth to limits. At some point you cannot tighten the screw any more. People no longer think that immigration policies should be more restrictive because they already are very restrictive. And people do not think that immigrants should leave the country because integration has happened. So the tide has turned.

We should turn and look at where the greater risk is to toleration and the liberal project. I think there are two risks. By the law of unintended consequences, over the past twenty years, by carrying out sometimes very stupid immigration policies – and also a few intelligent ones – the situation has actually improved. Integration happens. It’s an intergenerational process. It doesn’t matter what the politicians say, Europe has been quite a success in recent years in that regard. Many young people of immigrant background are now going through the education system and getting jobs. Intermarriage rates are going up. People speak the national languages. In the media, you have the presence of people who are visibly pluralistic in origin.

In the meantime we have moved from – when people were the most hostile to immigrants – only 2% of the population being of immigrant origin to today, when the numbers are– and I would contest Seyla’s numbers –  considerably higher immigrant-origin population ratios, between 5 to 10% in most European countries. The meaning of what it means to be a foreigner has also changed. With intermarriage– how are you going to count who is a “foreigner”? With more people getting citizenship, they’re no longer counted as foreigners. How do you count “foreigners”? It’s those people who don’t hold a national passport. But the laws have changed and provided more people with access to the acquisition of citizenship. Integration is a two-decade long process. Politicians and discussions about immigration rarely acknowledge the progress that has been made.

The real problem is that there are, by Gallup Poll estimates, 700 million people in the world who think they would like to migrate to another country. Particularly in Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, you have people who are in a situation where they have a little bit of education and a little bit of cash. They are the ones who want to migrate. They are also the ones that it is hardest for any Western country to integrate, because the skills do not match the jobs of the digital age. They possess few of the pre-requisites for successful assimilation. Significant progress has been made on immigration but we are unprepared for the future.

The second problem is that we also face the challenge of global counter-hegemonic networks. Some of these are benign but some are not benign. I am of course talking about jihadist terrorism and the extremist Islamist project, which I think today we have to be considerably more worried about than the discussions of the Arab Spring suggest. The problem is that when it comes to terrorism, a few people can have a highly disproportionate psychological impact. I’ve been working on terrorism lately, and I recently got to a point where I felt I could take a crack at coming up with an estimate of how many Westerners (people with Western residence and citizenship) who since 1998 have joined Al Qaeda’s movement, and how many people we could define as being “persons of interest” because of their support of Bin Laden’s organization. And the number, I’m sorry to tell you, is 12,000-15,000. I have in my own research identified about 3,000 people, all of Western background, who have been arrested, convicted or charged, or who have died in connection with Al Qaeda’s project.

In terms of the American war against global terrorism, it means that we have paid about $40 million per identified, convicted, or dead Al Qaeda-related terrorist in the West. (I’m not counting in this estimate the non-Westerners.) That is not a good trade-off. In London this past week there was a mass arrest in front of the American embassy of about 22 people coming from a banned organization called Muslims Against Crusades. It’s a jihadist organization. After getting banned, they re-formed immediately under the name of United Ummah, and the British government is now charging them with being an illegal organization. I don’t know if the government will succeed in making the charge stick, but there we have the greater danger to the liberal project, to democracy, as we know it. It is that the fringe of the fringe will drive us to highly disproportionate reaction, and whatever gains we have made over the last 20 years in improving social cohesion and global liberalization could unwind.

We have some very difficult decisions ahead of us in terms of trade-offs, because I don’t think anybody would argue that we should not consider restricting our democratic rights to be more safe. The question is what is the trade-off? How much do we need to restrict our current freedoms, the freedoms that have created this globalization and open society that you have all benefited tremendously from?

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Jytte Klausen is the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International Cooperation at Brandeis University and an Affiliate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.