Dr. Peter Mandaville

Good afternoon. Thank you very much to the organizers for the invitation and thank you to them also for attempting to achieve some measure of transatlantic rapprochement by having me share the panel with my smelly, cheese-eating, treacherous colleague from France! I should apologize to our discussant before I begin to speak. Yesterday's panels so inspired me that last night I decided to completely rewrite the entire presentation and it now bears only a very cursory resemblance to the paper Jorgen actually received. It's with some trepidation that I address this topic of the "foreign policy impact". One, because although my background is in international relations, I'm not really a foreign policy person per se. So I'm going to perhaps come at this from a slightly different angle than did Gilles and I'm also not going to even pretend to fit myself into the framework, the very useful framework that Shireen opened with. I'm also going to start with an anecdote that I think helps to give some sense, at least from the United States context, of how this question of political Islam in the wider world is playing out; in a sense to give you some idea of the worldview of certain policymakers and their advisors in the United States who are trying to get to grips with this. And also let me say that from time to time there’s going to be a slippage in my remarks between the European and American contexts because I moved to the United States from the UK just shortly before September 11th happened. So my own experience of these events and the foreign policy aftermath, so to speak, have been viewed very much from the American context. So if you'll forgive me I'm going to move back and forth between them. But I think this is quite an important thing to do in order to get a sense of the larger picture. The story that I want to begin with, I actually told at my lunch table just now, but I thought it would be useful to give you a sense of how these issues, at least in the immediate aftermath of September 11th, were viewed from Washington D.C. Because I'd done some work before on groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and Muhajiroun, who were understood in America to be radical "Wahhabi" movements closely tied to al-Qaeda, I was asked to come in and speak at an academic forum with the National Intelligence Council. What the National Intelligence Council does, for those of you who don’t know, is to coordinate communication (as you'll know, the United States has many difference intelligence services) between the CIA, the NSA, the DIA—which is the Pentagon's intelligence service—and the various intelligence branches of the joint armed services. From time to time they also get together and they have these seminars where outside specialists (even academics!) are brought in to talk about particular topics. So a bunch of us were asked to address the topic of political Islam in the wake of September the 11^th—trends, forecasts, etc. And of course the various representatives of these intelligence communities were there to ask us questions, the nature of which were very telling to me in terms of indicating, I guess, the schizophrenia and the rather desperate "connect-the-dots" type of game that was being played in the immediate aftermath of September the 11^th. It was particularly the type of questions that these different intelligence community posed and the perspectives contained within them that I found so interesting. The defence intelligence agency (DIA) person raised his hand and he said "Okay, can you tell us please, how much socio-economic deprivation exists in the West Bank and how can we convert this into an equation that will allow us to know what quantity of violence and militancy to expect over the next six months?" i.e. how poor are Palestinians and how many bombs will there be because of this? My academic colleagues and I kind of looked at each other puzzled, not quite sure how to engage with this, then a gentleman from the CIA raises his hand and says "How would you characterize the epistemological foundations of contemporary Muslim thought?" Completely at the other end of the spectrum, and equally difficult to engage with! And all the other questions fell somewhere in between these two extremes. One of the questions, interestingly, was specifically about Islam and Europe. This was about the time that the Hamburg cell was foremost in everyone's imagination and also about the time that Abu Qatada had mysteriously disappeared, and there was this sense at the time that somehow European Islam might be the sort of lynchpin around which these groups were operating -so they were very keen to get some sort of sense of all of this. I open with this just by way of trying to give you a sense of how this is all being looked at, but also to foreground the question that I want to open with, which is related to the nature of foreign policy itself. Now this is the last panel of the conference and it's the panel that is explicitly about foreign policy, but it's been very clear to me from the very beginning of our sessions yesterday that foreign policy has been enmeshed within everything that we've talking about until now. Insofar as the socio-economic, cultural and technological processes that we tend to describe using rather amorphous term 'globalization', insofar as these processes are evolving, I think it increasingly renders the rather stark and falsely dichotomist logic of "inside and outside" [the state] that underpins the conventional notion of foreign policy pretty meaningless. More specifically the idea that there's policy for things "out there" and policy for stuff "in here" and that these are two separate worlds which don't really relate to each other. In fact, everything that we've talked about today shows that the idea of a stark, distinct arena of foreign policy, particularly when it comes to the questions that we're dealing with, really doesn't get us very far. I think, for example, of some of the questions that came up when we were discussing citizenship, dual loyalty: the idea that one may be a citizen of "here", but also potentially have some affiliation with something out "there", an out there which is, of course, regarded as dangerous in this stark logic of inside and outside. The question of migration and the securitization of migration – another very clear example. Again, most starkly the case in the United States where it can be seen not only through things such as the Patriot Act, but also in certain fundamental changes to the institutional structure of the United States government. For example, we've recently had the Department of Homeland Security created, which now incorporates much of the immigration and naturalization service—meaning, therefore, that bodies moving across borders are viewed first and foremost as potentially a danger, as something to be understood under the rubric of security, a threat to the "inside". Now what I think this allows us to do, and I want to relate this to some of the questions that were asked right after the last panel about terrorism, is it helps us to get a handle on perhaps differences in the way the European Union, European countries, and the United States are approaching the question of post-September the 11th affiliations and identities, etc. This relates to the issue of approaching terrorism as war or terrorism as crime. It seems to me that the United States, if anything, has tried to bring the state back in, tried very hard to return us to a fairly standard understanding of international relations and foreign policy as 'inside' and 'outside'. This is the logic of war: ironically enough, dar al-Amrika and dar al-harb! Whereas the European Union, and I think this is tied to the fact that the European project is itself about moving beyond very sharply delineated notions of sovereignty, is in fact trying to work terrorism more as a form of criminal activity, perhaps transnational crime, but certainly a situation whereby you can't talk about (at least for legal purposes) clear sovereign entities. In order to work within the normative regulations that relate to warfare, you have to be able to talk in terms of sovereign entities at war. This simply isn't the case here. This then, I think, gives us a useful entry point, my basic point being that foreign policy is central to everything that we've been talking about so far, although it may not have been foreign policy per se as we would conventionally understand it. I was somewhat confused when I initially saw the title of this panel, because it said "The foreign policy impact in European countries". Now I wasn't sure if I was being asked to talk about the impact of European Muslims on the foreign policies of European countries or if I was being asked to talk about the impact of foreign policy on the Muslims of Europe. My instinctive reading was the latter, which kind of meshes more with the more anthropological perspective I like to take. Now it may be possible to talk in terms of the former as Gilles did, and I think that something of this approach was contained within Shireen's framework—and there are certainly relevant examples here that we can bring up. There are those who point to, for example, the rejection by Turkish Muslims in Germany of the Christian Democrats and their anti-EU membership for Turkey orientation as an aspect of something like this. There's also been an article recently published in the foreign affairs magazine "Foreign Policy" (published by the Carnegie Endowment in Washington) by Omer Taspinar, who speaks in terms of Europe's ‘Muslim street' in much the same way as there’s been an emphasis in Washington on a mythical ‘Arab street' that somehow feeds into the foreign policies of Middle Eastern states. So there do seem to be those trying to talk about Europe's ‘Muslim street' in the same regard. But I want to focus on the second dimension, the impact of European and American foreign policies on Muslims in Europe. And, insofar as many aspects of London's foreign policy on these issues seem to be driven out of Washington DC currently, this enmeshment is okay. First of all, what I note very strongly in terms of the impact of foreign policies and foreign policy events on Muslims in Europe is a very stark repolarization, not simply in terms of ‘Islam and the West’ issues, but a strong repolarization of Muslim communities within Europe—that is, polarizations within those communities. And all of this, unfortunately, after a period in the late 90s and early 2000s, during which there was so much emphasis on and fairly rapid progress being made towards greater unity among European Muslims—with the situation perhaps even moving towards something like the banalization of Islam in Europe that Roger spoke about yesterday. A lot of that, I think, was undone in a matter of a few hours on the morning of September 11th. And suddenly a new politics of Muslim identity very rapidly returns to Muslim communities in Europe: questions relating to the public identity of individuals and institutions, and a new politics surrounding questions about the extent to which these organizations are ‘really Muslim’ or to what extent they are simply ‘lackeys’ of governments that kowtow to Washington. The Muslim Council in Britain, for example, fell prey to some of this kind of talk. These are the kinds of polarizations that I'm talking about. In the United States this largely took the form of questions basically phrased as "Where are the moderate Muslims?" – now this is a phrase that's incredibly problematic for me, the assumption apparently being that unless you put ‘moderate’ in front of ‘Muslim’ that somehow immoderation must be the default Muslim position. I don't know what people are really asking here. My guess is that they mean something like, "Where are the Muslims who will renounce violence and embrace the values of democracy?"—again, seemingly ignorant of the fact that these are precisely the values shared by the vast majority of Muslims in the United States and Europe in the first place. But again, it puts Muslims on the defensive, certainly in the United States and here a well, such that there emerged a largely reactionary mode, a reactionary mode of identity articulation and creation that came to define what it means to be a Muslim here. Post-9/11, the foreign policy environment also provided a very fertile context for groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun and relative newcomers, Supporters of Sharia (the people around Abu Hamza), to try once again, as they did in the mid-1990s to define the political agenda and articulate the political imperatives, saying i.e. that if you're a real Muslim, then you would be engaged in global jihad – claiming that's what you really need to do if you're an actual Muslim with a sense of place in the world. And in the way that this filtered over to America these groups were understood to be playing a very important role. The banlieus of Londonistan (Finsbury Park, etc.) were seen from Washington as something particularly problematic. Hizb ut-Tahrir was considered particularly worrisome insofar as the group had emerged quite strongly recently in Central Asia and also insofar as the United States had come to believe that a second front on the war on terrorism was opening up in Southeast Asia. It was noted with interest that Hizb ut-Tahrir is the fastest growing Islamic movement in Southeast Asia, in recent months (suddenly Hizb ut-Tahrir banners have started to appear in the daily street protests of Jakarta) and from Washington this was connected to the idea that "Ah, these are the folks that are trying to establish some sort of pan-Southeast Asian mini-umma that will link together Singapore and Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia" into a regional Muslim polity. Again, all of this confusion growing and feeding on itself. The foreign policy dimension, I think, rather than creating something—that is, creating brand new dynamics—instead simply exacerbates many of the issues, problems and themes that we discussed in earlier sessions – asylum and discrimination, notions of citizenship and belonging. In the current foreign policy environment, the stakes are higher, the positions become sharper, and the context much more highly politicized. Part of the problem, though, is that the wrong foreign policy issues have set the terms of debate and there's inevitably been Muslim reaction to this – the idea, for example, that this is all to be understood under the rubric of something like a war on terrorism, such that the focus is always on Afghanistan or on Iraq. However, while Kashmir festers and while Palestine remains totally marginalized, the problems obviously will continue. Now I may be playing to the room here when I say this, but so long as Washington D.C. doesn't place these other issues fairly central to what it calls the 'war on terrorism', it's not only going to continue to marginalize Muslims in the United States and Europe, but it will also in fact be failing to deal with the issues that to some extent drive support for extremist behavior. However, and echoing what John Esposito said earlier, you can't just make token gestures towards European or American Muslims—i.e. "take a Muslim to lunch". Rather, there needs to be greater recognition of that the fact that "it's the policy, stupid". In the larger sense though, what's been most problematic to me, aside from the specific foreign policy issues (e.g. Palestine, or the lack of attention to it) is the worldview and the moral geography that seems to emanating out of Washington. This has as much to with rhetoric as it does with policy substance, but is, in a sense, even more dangerous in terms of the effect it has on how Muslims, or the extent to which Muslims, are given space to have a voice with regard to foreign policy issues. And it's summed up and contained within the administration’s famous post-9/11 "With us or against us" moment, where a very stark moral geography was painted in black and white: "You're with us or you're against us"…leaving very little room for a Muslim to state that "I totally renounce the violence of a Bin Laden, but I also have a few complaints about the way the United States conducts itself in other parts of the world." In other words, you immediately become an object of suspicion if your critique of Bin Laden continues on to a critique of Washington D.C. So although there was much being said about "Well, we must reassure Muslims that this is not a war on Islam in anyway," the very terms of debate, the terms of engagement with the world emanating out of foreign policy making circles had the effect of setting up a world in which it becomes very possible or very difficult for Muslims to articulate a sense of self without being trapped in some kind of securitization dilemma. Finally, I note with interest that while this has been a conference on Muslims in Europe, there's not been that much attention paid to how these issues play out within the context of Europe in the larger institutional sense. The presentations by Maleiha, Valerie and Anya this morning gestured profitably toward that dimension of things. That's very important. The project of Europe is, intrinsically, a project that seeks to find accommodation between multiple affiliations—i.e. the ability to be part of a national polity while at the same time being a member of something larger or even something de-territorialized (not to say here, of course, that the EU is something de-territorialized, but we are certainly talking about less sharply delineated borders and certainly less of a conjunction between identity and territoriality). Now this to me resonates to some extent with the sense in which Muslim identity or polity is not necessarily tied to, first and foremost, notions of territory. Rather, Islam refers mainly to a shared normative orientation, the commitment to something larger, and in that sense I think it's fair to say that the fate of Europe, the fate of Islam in Europe is to some extent also tied to the fate of the project of Europe more largely. And so I welcome the fact that some of the most innovative and forward thinking work in this regard seems to be done by those Muslim groups that are moving out of purely national contexts. Again, not to knock its importance. Valerie wisely reminded us earlier of why we do still need to pay attention to the national context. But the next step, I think, is being taken by those groups such as the Federation of European Muslim Youth Organizations based in Brussels who are starting to realize that these issues need to be dealt with at an inherently transnational level, such as Europe itself. I’ll welcome that approach wholeheartedly and leave it there. Thank you.