In contrast, the Dutch government’s Minderhedennota, or minority policies, provided a large degree of cultural autonomy for “ethnic minorities” in the 1980s. A wide range of ethnic, national, and religious identities were recognized in the belief that confident subcultures would facilitate integration, and minority elites were incorporated into the policy process through the subvention of representative organizations. Although this Dutch multiculturalism avant la lettre was partially reversed in the 1990s, the institutional effects are there for all to see. The Netherlands has a state-funded Islamic broadcasting network, Nederlandse Moslim Omroep, an Islamic school board, an Islamic pedagogic center, and more than 40 Islamic schools, all of which are government funded with a regular Dutch curriculum. Closer inspection reveals, however, that the outcomes of Dutch policies are far from a multicultural utopia, an example being a bill proposing to allow one-sided marriage dissolution for Muslims, which would have put group law above national civic law by denying the individual equality of women. In such instances, the famous Dutch tolerance seemed almost prepared to sanction similar attitudes among Muslims to the illiberal ones, for example against homosexuality, that it has tolerated from Protestant fundamentalists. Dutch Muslims actually protested against such proposals. Indeed, the separation of Islamic minorities from native Dutch people, resulting from integration policies, has led to recent assimilationist policy shift. Now, the accepted wisdom is that previous policies granted too many concessions, too easily, to too many groups. Dutch toleration of Islam led to less public conflicts, but this can also be read as a lack of care for ensuring community cohesion. If the native Dutch are self-organized in their own community “pillars” and their lives do not come into any institutional contact with Muslims, then why should they be bothered by the Muslims’ cultural demands and customs?

A Threat to Community Cohesion?

For all the hot air about the purported threat of Islam and migrants’ cultural demands to the stability of liberal societies, empirically grounded knowledge on such controversies has been rather thin on the ground. In recent years, I undertook a large cross-national study of public debates over immigration and ethnic relations in Europe with colleagues Ruud Koopmans from the Free University of Amsterdam, and Marco Giugni and Florence Passy from the University of Geneva. Our empirical research is based on samples of the political demands coded from comparable newspaper sources, made by all types of actors over eight years and across several countries. This representative cross-national sample of claims over immigration and ethnic relations allows us to answer questions regarding the extent and form of migrants’ cultural demands in the public domain.

A striking finding was that political controversies over migrants’ cultural group demands were far less prominent than one might expect. In Britain, France, the Netherlands and Germany, they accounted for between 7.7 and a miniscule 1.2 percent of the public debates over immigration and ethnic relations. Included in this figure are demands by migrants for cultural rights and recognition, which make up only between 3.4 and 0.4 percent. It appears that the scale of the migrants’ cultural challenge to the liberal state has been exaggerated within the debates on multiculturalism, at least with respect to the consequences of immigration in Europe. European societies do not appear to be tearing themselves apart at the cultural seams, nor do the political demands of migrants appear to be significantly threatening carriers of cultural differentiation.

Our research did confirm, however, that cultural demands are mostly specific to migrants using Muslim or Islamic identities. In the Britain, France, and the Netherlands, where we found enough cases to study, Muslims made 61.4 percent, 51.0 percent, and 46.4 percent of cultural demands respectively. In a situation where, with the exception of the Netherlands, policies do not recognize such forms of identification, how do we explain this resilience of Muslim identities? Here comparison with other non-Christian migrant religions is revealing. In other words, how do we explain the relative absence of Jews and Hindus?

With respect to Judaism, this relative absence—Jews made 2.2 percent of migrants’ cultural demands in Netherlands, 6.8 percent in Britain—could be explained by the longer presence of Jews in the society of settlement, by the greater secularization of belief and practice, and by the greater incorporation of special rights and privileges for Jews in state policies, partly in response to guilt about the Holocaust. However, such factors do not hold for Hindus, who are equally conspicuous by their absence in public controversies over cultural difference, making only 2.3 percent of migrants’ cultural demands in Britain and 6.7 percent in the Netherlands. Hindus settled in the same waves of post-war migration, hail from the same regions of origin with the same postcolonial traditions, have the same type of community structure based on familial ties and patron-client relationships, and face the same levels of recognition from minority policies as Muslims. It is here that the nature of religion matters as an explanatory variable. The main difference is in the role of institutional religion for the migrant community; Islam is a much more visible and public religion than Hinduism. It places strong demands on its followers in regard to their public behavior and interactions with core institutions. Such religious requirements of Islam make the mosque the regular and central focus of most aspects of communal, associational, and collective life for the migrant community. Crucially, the mosque takes on a political role, not only in negotiating with the authorities of the society of settlement and conducting service, but in providing moral sustenance to the community and defining what political behavior should be. In contrast, there may be no public Hindu temple for collective worship, or the temple may be in the home, the private domain of life away from public view. In addition, the Hindu faith requires few public collective celebrations, and there is a wide variety of sects and co-existing interpretations of faith, which makes it unlikely that religious institutions would become the key infrastructure for migrant communities in their interactions with the society of settlement.

In this time of a revival in Islamic belief, the difficulty in the separation between politics and religion in Islam has led to conflicts across Europe. The Dutch experience shows that conferring group rights too easily may result in migrant groups turning inward, identifying less strongly with the majority society, and becoming tied up in internal factional community politics. The British case suggests that the political participation of Muslims with group-specific incommensurable demands can lead to seemingly irresolvable conflicts. The French case shows that strong assimilative pressures can push such migrant groups away from identification with the political process and into a choice between a neutered or politicized Islam. Germany’s experience demonstrates that migrants have to be politically part of a society before they can express themselves in it. Overall, Muslim migrants appear to be an exceptional case in their cultural resilience to adaptation. Irrespective of policy approaches, conflicts are bound to persist, because Islam does not restrict itself to religious faith but advances into the political realm, where the state’s authority and civic citizenship obligations reign supreme. Conflicts are thus likely to continue.