John Lloyd

Multiculturalism is a Western ideal, amounting to a secular faith. Every Western government at least mouths its mantras – that a mix of peoples in one nation is a social good, that it enriches what had been a tediously monolithic culture, that it improves (especially for the Anglo-Saxons) our cuisine, our dress sense and our love lives. Besides, we need these immigrants: In Europe at least, where demographic decline is still the order of the day in most states, where else will the labor come from? Who else replenishes the state pension fund? Even where leaders criticize multiculturalism’s tendency to shield communities from justified criticism – Angela Merkel of Germany and David Cameron of the UK have both spoken out on this – they touch only on its more obvious failings. As a process, they agree it is welcome.

Forgotten, or at least suppressed, in this narrative is religion and the animating force it still gives to many groups. Animating – and also divisive. To believe deeply in a religion had been, in the West as well as elsewhere, to believe deeply in the error of those not of the same faith, and to shun them. It has been one of the remarkable transformations of the past century that in the West, those of religious faith, or none, should accommodate the faiths of others. Indeed, they should even honor them. Those societies where that did not happen — say, until very recently, Ireland — the culture was seen as aberrant.

The reverse is true in many strongly Islamic societies. And that’s causing a problem for the Christians still living in them.

In Pakistan, the Christians number around 2.5 million. At 1.5 percent of the population, it is the largest minority in an otherwise wholly Muslim country, its origin as a community stemming entirely from the missionary activities of the British colonialists and the small number of Christians who stayed on after independence came in 1947. Promised complete equality, the progressive Islamization of the state has put increasing pressure on Christians, who face both official discrimination and periodic popular violence. The latter increased in the past decade: Last year claimed two prominent victims.

Shahbaz Bhatti, 42 years old, was the federal minister for minority affairs, a Catholic and a strong opponent of the country’s blasphemy laws: In March, his car was sprayed with bullets. By the time he got to the hospital, he was dead on arrival. The group Tehrik-i-Taliban claimed responsibility, citing Bhatti as a “known blasphemer.” The murder came two months after another, of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer. Although not a Christian, Taseer had also strongly opposed the blasphemy law and offered support to those caught in it. He was shot in January by one of his bodyguards, Malik Qadri, reportedly associated with the Dawat-e-Islami group.

There also isn’t much multicultural harmony in countries where Christianity and Islam are both strong. In Nigeria, where the two religions each make up about half the population, tension and violence has tended to increase. Over the Christmas and New Year’s period, the Islamist group Boko Haram (the name means “Western education is a sin”) attacked Christian worshippers, culminating (so far) in a Jan. 20 gun and bomb attack in Kano, a mainly Muslim city in the north of the country: The attack, on police as well as Christians, claimed 185 lives. The aftermath has seen Muslims and Christians come together in the capital, Lagos, to pray for peace. The present reality is increased fear and distance.

It’s in Christianity’s former heartland – the Middle East – that the religion faces its most poignant fate. The reasons why Christianity is now quite rapidly disappearing are contentious. Some, like the late Edward Said (himself from a Christian tradition), saw Western imperialism, support for Israel and aggressive intervention as the culprits. Others point to a millennium-long Islamic pressure on a faith regarded as a blasphemy. More recently a much more violent pressure has appeared from Islamist fundamentalism, stirring — as the Lebanese scholar Habib Malik put it in an essay for the Hoover Institution — “ancient antagonisms and reviv(ing) atavistic rejections of the different other as a despised infidel.” Christians were some 20 percent of the Middle Eastern population a century ago. Now, they are estimated to account for about 5 percent.

Thus throughout the Middle Eastern Muslim states, Christians retreat. In Gaza and the West Bank, Christians make up only about 2 percent of the population. Even the relatively large community in Bethlehem is declining. In Iraq, the slow drop in Christian numbers was much accelerated after the invasion let loose sectarian violence: Some half of the community has left. In Iran, traditional Christian groups are recognized in the constitution and given parliamentary seats – but face informal discrimination and leave. In Saudi Arabia, both public and private expressions of Christianity are banned (though the latter is rarely enforced). The only Christians are foreign workers or visitors, who must keep their blasphemy to themselves.

Until relatively recently, the largest single Christian community, the Egyptian Copts, had been relatively secure. The 19th century brought them not just toleration but recognition, especially of their religious and political rights. But the 20th century, with the growth of the view that Egypt should not be for Egyptians but for Muslims, saw pressure bear down on the Copts, moderated only by the suppression of Islamism from above — especially during the period of rule by Gamal Abdel Nasser, from 1956 until his death in 1970. Anti-Copt riots and murders continued through the seventies and eighties: their position improved in the nineties, when former President Hosni Mubarak, under international pressure, returned land and property taken from the Copts years before and improved security. Sporadic attacks, however, continued: They are underrepresented in the administration and in politics, and media attacks on them persist.

The greater fear now, in Egypt as elsewhere, is that the Arab Spring has a dark side. Anti-Copt riots were a feature of last year: A Coptic demonstration against the burning of one of their churches in October saw more than 20 dead as the army charged the demonstrators. The irony that the Christian tradition is older in the area than Islam’s (and once dominant in it) is ignored in the zeal for purification.

In December, the Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the world’s Anglicans, told the House of Lords in London that “the position of Christians in (the Middle East) is more vulnerable than it has been for centuries … of late, the Coptic community has seen levels of emigration rise to unprecedented heights, and in a way that would have been unthinkable even a very few years ago, it is anxious about sharing the fate of other Christian communities that once seemed securely embedded in their setting.”

Christians, now, cannot look for security in any setting where Islam makes a monopolistic claim on the hearts and minds of the people. Fervent faith in one part of the world; a secular trust in the benign effects of cultural mixing in another. The two are not, for the moment, meeting.

PHOTO: An injured Christian protester holds a statue of Christ and shows off a bullet during clashes with soldiers and riot police in Cairo, October 9, 2011. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh

Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith … is in want of a yacht.

She had one, the Royal Yacht Britannia, which she loved very much. When the Labour government of Tony Blair said it was too expensive and decommissioned it soon after assuming office in 1997, she was seen to weep at the ceremony. Last year, Blair was reported as saying he regretted the decision, pressed upon him by the then-chancellor, Gordon Brown, and inherited from the previous, Conservative administration. It cost £11 million a year to run, and a necessary refit would have cost some £50 million. So it was put out to the nautical equivalent of pasture. It’s now on show at a dock in Leith, the port of Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh, where it’s in much demand as a venue for “occasions.”

If in want of a yacht, Queen Elizabeth has never lacked for gallant courtiers. Michael Gove, the secretary of state for education, earlier this month wrote to the prime minister suggesting that for her Diamond Jubilee, to be celebrated in June this year, she should be promised (the event is too near for her to be “given”) a replacement yacht, to express the love her subjects bear her. After a little to-ing and fro-ing, Gove clarified that he had not meant that the expense – which might be some £80 million to £100 million – should be borne from the public purse, but rather would be raised from her (presumably better-heeled) admirers. The prime minister said he was all for it, on that basis. The deputy prime minister, Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg, made a not-too-bad joke, saying the world was divided into the “yachts and the have-yachts.”

This is a storm in a royal teacup, to be sure: The money may not be raised, the yacht never built. Already, a grand river pageant is planned for June 3, when the Diamond Jubilee will be celebrated with a four-day weekend holiday for all. The star of that show will be a luxury river boat, the Spirit of Chartwell, transformed by the film set designer Joseph Bennett into a gilded, garlanded royal barge. Bennett did the sets for the grandiose TV series Rome, so he may have had in mind the lines heralding Cleopatra’s watery arrival to meet her lover, the Roman general Antony, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: “The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
 Burn’d on the water.”

Is not the barge enough? It will cost £10 million, the cost to be met by private sponsorship and donations. Are there enough generous royalists left after that to put up some £80 million to £100 million for a yacht?

Even if there are, it’s a bad idea. Gove, a former journalist and one of the sharpest minds in the British Cabinet, has allowed his affection for the queen to nudge him into making a rare presentational mistake. The queen should not have a yacht — and it is the royalists who should be most concerned that she should not.

First, it puts her among the superrich. She is, indeed, very rich: Her fortune is estimated at just under £2 billion, which makes her the 19th wealthiest woman in the world and the second richest woman monarch (after Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, who tops £2 billion). But her style, her activities and above all her public relations have kept her removed from the yacht set – a set led by a near neighbor of hers, who lives a mile or so west of Buckingham Palace and who owns the Chelsea soccer team. Roman Abramovich’s Eclipse, the largest yacht in the world (557 feet) and the most expensive (nearly £1 billion) is one of four he has, the Eclipse having two swimming pools, two helicopter pads and a small submarine. Abramovich was embroiled till last week in an effort to strike down a suit against him from former fellow oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He has just lost his bid to defeat the suit, and so the substantive case will go to a full trial in October. The sight of these two enormously wealthy men, whose riches were torn from an impoverished country, brawling over billions is at once fascinating and melancholy. The queen shouldn’t join that class.

Second, though her popularity is likely to reach such levels in this year that she will easily ride out any criticism, she will, at some time not too distant, hand over the crown, voluntarily or necessarily, to her son, Prince Charles. (Presuming the crown does not skip a generation and go her grandson, Prince William, who is so far a somewhat colorless man but whose elegant wife, Kate, is lionized by the press and has made no mistakes.) Prince Charles is no longer as unpopular as he was when his first wife, Princess Diana, died: but he’s not popular, either, and his occupancy of a super-yacht while he tells the world it must conserve energy or die will be a constant, legitimate source of a charge of hypocrisy.

Third, there are a host of better things on which to spend £100 million, especially in these dark days. Some pointers.

• A network of Queen Elizabeth II centers for the young, in which those finding it hard (if not impossible) to get work can go for counseling, work experience, volunteering at home and abroad, training, and networking. Assuming that the money comes from corporations and rich individuals, these could remain associated with the centers, forging links between the workless and workplaces; while the wealthy should be encouraged to experiment with ideas of how to provide broader perspectives to the unemployed than joyless leisure.

• The same for the aging: in this case, to propose ways in which the healthy elderly can continue to make contributions to society and their own well-being; to point to further education and other courses that engage the mind and body; and to encourage a spirit of solidarity and neighborliness. As with the centers for young people, other institutions work in the same area. But this would carry the prestige of the queen’s name and would have her patronage – which counts for much, especially among the older generations.

• A fund to help make the royal properties – principally Balmoral Castle in the Highlands of Scotland, Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, Windsor Castle and above all Buckingham Palace in the center of London  itself – much more open to the public than they are now. The queen, or at least her successor, should take the initiative to considerably downsize the monarchy, moving the royal family to the still large Central London properties of Clarence House (where Prince Charles lives when in London) or St. James Palace (Princess Anne’s London home). To be sure, visiting heads of state will no longer be housed in Buckingham Palace: so what? Clarence House and St. James’ Palace have guest rooms. If there are entourage problems, some of the grandest hotels in the world — the Ritz,  Claridges, the Savoy – are not far away. Buckingham Palace should be a national resource: everything from a history lesson to a business tool (one of the ostensible reasons for the yacht).

The grandeur of the British royals will fade as Elizabeth goes. It’s best to recognize and plan for it now. A yacht, with a life of decades, will come to seem more and more inappropriate, and less and less attuned to a country where the issues of work, poverty and ignorance remain to be tackled and moderated. To assist in that work would be a legacy fit for a queen.

PHOTO: Britain’s Queen Elizabeth arrives for a Christmas Day service at St. Mary Magdalene Church on the Royal estate at Sandringham, Norfolk in east England, December 25, 2011.  REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett

With so much unemployment about, and more to come, it seems reasonable to fear that more crime will come with it. The devil, after all, finds work for idle hands, and that English proverb finds echoes everywhere. The French and the Finns say that “idleness is the mother of all vices” (the Italians think the same, except that it’s the father); the Portuguese, that “an empty head is the devil’s workshop”; the Egyptians, that “the idle hand is impure.” Who can gainsay such an accord of folk wisdom?

The U.S. crime statistics, for one. The big rise in U.S. unemployment (it’s going down a little now, but it’s still high, at around nine percent) hasn’t been accompanied by a surge in crime. The stagnation of working- and middle-class incomes hasn’t sent the sufferers out onto the street in orgies of thieving or robbery with assault. Although Americans – bamboozled by super-violent films and TV’s concentration on murder and rape – fear crime as much, if not more, than ever, still the real decline in most crimes is large, and has continued.

The reasons for rises and falls in crime are always contested, but one reason commonly cited – though not universally agreed upon – is the high rate of incarceration in the U.S. And it’s not just that the U.S. locks up people more willingly than other countries – the UK sends about the same percentage to prison. It’s that the prisoners spend longer, often much longer, inside. Research by Steven Levitt and William Spelman points to these sentences as reducing crime by a lot – about one-quarter. Other researchers say it’s much less (though still accounting for a measurable decline) and that the social effects, especially on young black men without college degrees or even high school diplomas, who are disproportionately incarcerated, outweigh the gains.

There are other reasons. Less cocaine is now taken, either heavily or recreationally, than was the case a decade or more ago. Police methods, especially forensics, have become much more sophisticated, which has meant more arrests and more convictions. People look after their property better. It may even be the case that reduced levels of lead in young bloodstreams – down by four-fifths in the past decade – have reduced crime, as high levels of lead in teenage bloodstreams have long been linked to aggression and criminal behavior.

Much more speculatively, it could be that our culture has changed. James Q. Wilson – the social scientist whose work on policing of crime-ridden areas inspired shifts to no-tolerance methods, where actions that makes neighborhoods unsafe or just unpleasant (broken windows, graffiti) are pursued and punished – said in his 2011 Manhattan Lecture that we have moved from a 1960s-inspired, ultra-liberal ethos of self-expression to a more conservative ethic of self-control. He added, though, that no one knew how to measure the effects of such a move, if move it was.

Like him, and with his caveat, I think culture is important, but I also think that as culture has changed over the past half-century, so it is likely to change again – if, that is, high levels of unemployment persist. For the loss of jobs isn’t likely to be substantially reversed when the Western economies move into growth – even relatively high growth. There are structural reasons why we might be stuck with terrible situations, like 40 percent youth unemployment in Spain and large-scale job losses week by week in Greece and Portugal.

If you divide jobs into three categories – transformational, transactional and interactional – only the last is, and will be for a while, a reliable supplier of well-paid and good jobs. The first, transformational, means making cars, doing farm work, or building houses and schools, work that is very substantially automated, and will be further. Transactional means work dealing with the public, as in call centers – which have been labor intensive, and indeed have provided something of a (low-paid) cushion against redundancies from transformational jobs – but are now also being automated, rapidly. (There is a sub-group here that is, according to the Economist, growing: domestic service. And while much of it isn’t very well rewarded, some of it is: A good butler can cost you £150,000 a year.)

It’s in the interactional jobs where the growth, and the high pay, is to be found: in finance, in the law, and in some parts of the media. These need a lot of training, and invariably at least one degree. Which means that people who took unskilled, or low-skilled – or some kinds of skilled – work now face a tough market. And that greatly exacerbates the gap between the have-a-lots and the have-littles, even for those with work (which is still most of us).

Long-term, chronic unemployment for young men with few prospects and little shape to their lives strikes me as a big challenge to a trend of declining crime. This is even more the case because criminality in the world – especially in organized-crime gangs and in corruption networks – isn’t declining: Indeed, globally, it’s leaping ahead. Stuart Gilman, an expert on corrupt practices (as an investigator, not a participant) told me that there are quite a few “kleptocracies” in the world and that “though we can stop some of it, I’m always surprised at how smart the criminals are. They are always one step ahead. Once you strip off the veil of legitimate marketplaces, it’s amazing what, in so many places, is underneath.” One of the Wikileaks documents that circulated in December 2010 was a cable from the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, John Beyrle, to the effect that corruption is the system. Gilman says that there is no easy line to draw between corruption, organized crime and terrorism – all can merge into one other.

Networks of crime, corruption and terrorism hold out to the disenfranchised young the rewards of status, money and a kind of respect (also, of course, risks of pain, imprisonment and death). States that have been able to keep these networks out, or at any rate down, face a tougher struggle in doing so than before: Globalization works for crime too, even if slowly (mafias can and do migrate, but tend to stick to their own national turf). But within these cultures, look at the “success” of organized crime gangs in Italy (now spreading to the north from the south); in Russia, burgeoning over the past 20 years; in Mexico, where the drug gangs can terrorize whole regions and account for more violent deaths of nosy journalists than anywhere else in the world; in China, where, as in Russia, a softening of tyrannical rule meant a big spike in crime; in India, where gangs flourish, violent crime has risen fast in the past half-century (by over 200 percent, for murders), and where corruption, too, is a way of government and much commercial life.

The power these criminal subcultures have – apart from the considerable ability to acquire vast sums of money, terrorize their victims and even cow (or penetrate) governments – is to lower the defenses the young have against involvement with them. It’s what happened in the U.S. and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s, when a reserve army of young labor provided foot soldiers for crime mobs. A sense of hope betrayed by economies that cannot meet the needs of employment could do the same – on a larger, more global scale.

PHOTO: A cache of weapons seized from a vehicle from an outbound (southbound) examination at Del Rio International Bridge in Texas, is seen in this U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) handout photograph taken February 1, 2011. REUTERS/U.S. Customs and Border Protection/Handout

Organized workers of the world are united on at least one big thing: that the recession which has settled over much of what was once called the developed world (and if we are not wise and active, may soon be better called the “undeveloping world”) should not load more onto the burdened backs of the working class.

But it will. Politicians everywhere see little choice.

In the United States, right-to-work laws are being pushed hard in those states with Republican leadership. The laws stop unions from forcing non-union workers to obey union decisions in plants where they have contracts. And when these laws are on the books, the unequivocal result is that union organization and membership slump. More controversially, those who support these laws claim that investment in the state grows – thus increasing the number of jobs and sometimes the level of wages.

In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy is preparing a package of measures, due to be outlined on Jan. 18 at a meeting with employers’ and union leaders, that he hopes will allow companies to reduce working hours and pay in slack times, with increases at a time of full demand. No one expects an agreement soon (if ever), and since the President faces a re-election battle in the spring, he is politically vulnerable to disruption. But even if Socialist candidate François Hollande, ahead now in the polls by some 10 percent, were to win, he would be trying something of the same, since French companies’ competitiveness is tending to fall.

In the UK, large if brief public sector strikes have disrupted transport, customs inspection and schools, as David Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition government seeks to impose cuts in public sector pensions and to stretch working life: a double whammy that the unions have regarded as unacceptable.

But it is in Italy, the largest of the European states now in the economic fever ward, that the struggle over the conditions under which working people sell their labor is most acute. The technocratic, unelected government of the former European Commissioner, former Bocconi University economics professor Mario Monti, increasingly finds itself drawn into a confrontation with the country’s three big union confederations – especially the CGIL, led by Susanna Camusso. And emerging at the heart of the confrontation is the defining element of the coming clash, at once symbolic and concrete: an article, number 18, of the 1970 Labor law, saying that sackings or layoffs of workers in any company employing more than 15 workers must, if challenged, be approved by a judge before they can go ahead. Employers hate it; the unions see it as a large achievement. The CGIL, professing itself ready to negotiate on many issues, has said in advance that Article 18 is “not for discussion.”

Italy, after the war, became not a socialist but a “social” republic: The first clause of its constitution says that its republican existence is “based on work.” For much of the post-war period into the early 1990s, a powerful left was mostly organized by the Communist Party – the biggest in the West – and by the trade unions.

The Communist Party was in a permanent if large minority. But it held city and regional power in the central “red belt” of the long peninsula, and the unions, with the CGIL to the fore, commanded the shop floor in the big factories of the north.

To be sure, governments into the 1980s were always dominated by the Christian Democrats, more or less strongly anti-communist. But if the left took its lead from a revolutionary Marx, the Christian Democrats based their domestic vision and policies on the social teachings of the Vatican – which was itself only a little less anti-capitalist than it was anti-communist. The result was legislation and customs that favored both workers’ and social solidarity, with unions and professions organizing networks of associations and clubs that acted as their power bases – strongly defended by them and largely untouched by governments.

The intricate balances of this polity worked well – very well, economically – in the decades after the war, but they fell apart in a flurry of corruption allegations, charges and convictions in the eighties. After a period of Socialist-led rule, politics came, from the early- to mid-1990s, to be dominated by one figure above all others: Silvio Berlusconi, whose media, money and chutzpah allowed him to create a coalition of the right that exercised power for most of the years since 1994, when he first won office. The sheer power of the Berlusconi package, coupled with the passivity and disorganization of the left, meant that a majority continued, till last year, to allow themselves to be seduced into the belief that all was fine, or would be fine — until suddenly it wasn’t. Berlusconi resigned, and Professor Monti and his fellow technocrats, appointed by the President with the main parties’ acquiescence, took over with a plan called — with equal measures of hope and desperation — “Save Italy.” To them has fallen the dreary task of taking, and trying to enforce, the decisions at which the elected politicians balked.

They have inherited a country with a huge public debt, a stalled economy, a leaping unemployment rate, and a poor and mafia-ridden south. And a rigid labor market: much discussed, the subject of many proposals for reform – but in its essentials untouched since better times. Within that rigidity, Article 18 now emerges as the core issue, carrying the weight of the industrialists’ complaints that they cannot be masters in their own plants and that Italy’s low rate of foreign investment and high incidence of strikes are all due to laws that give overweening power to militant unions.

Italy’s most famed and largest company, the vehicle maker Fiat (now the owner of Chrysler), has broken with the employers’ organization, Confindustria, so that it can make – or break – the national union contracts the organization has traditionally negotiated. Most of its production is now abroad – in Brazil and Poland – where it can get higher productivity. Mario Carraro, whose company makes transmission systems and who heads the Confindustria in the Veneto region, said in an interview in Corriere della Sera that “when Article 18 was written, the world was one in which people believed the myth of a stable job and wanted to work in a factory. The world has changed.”

These signs point to a great struggle ahead, in Italy and in much of the rest of the West. It brings together the terrible dilemmas of a European continent now facing, especially in its most pressurized countries of the south, a root-and-branch reconstruction of its welfare systems, its public provision of health and education, and its labor laws and customs. And though these have, in the past decades, produced relatively generous outcomes, most working people are still not too many months of unemployment away from a hard time. More, they see in the media and in the streets the rich and super-rich, often with salaries and bonuses still growing, revving up their Ferraris and able to accelerate out of the swamp in which many within the majority find themselves. They will tend to object.

In Italy – and in Greece – the matter is aggravated by the fact that the government, though ruling with the consent of the elected, does not itself have an electoral mandate. It has been hired to do the dirty work, and the work is becoming dirtier by the day. Italy is strongly group-oriented, with too little sense of a national community – as many of its intellectuals have lamented. Its groups are now closing ranks to defend what they have won. For an example of this behavior, the unions need only look to the parliamentarians: the best paid in Europe, now facing quite modest proposals for a diminution of their income and this week fiercely defending that income.

Everywhere, the decisions now being taken with the aim of increasing the country’s productivity and jobs will run into the basic question: Do the groups recognize the national need to adapt to globalization’s demands? Or will they fight to the death to keep what better times brought?

Solidarity, of either the Marxian or the Papal sort, is now seen, as Mario Carraro put it, as part of an old world, now irrevocably changed.

Modern economies need flexibility, and that means individuals, not groups, willing to move, retrain, come and, above all, go. This week began, on New Year’s Day, with messages from the world’s leaders: In Europe, at least, they warned of a hard year to come. Hardest, likely, for the workers.

PHOTO: Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti gestures as he attends the television show “Che tempo che fa” in Milan, Jan. 8, 2012. REUTERS/Stefano Rellandini