Europe is at its most noble when it strives for respect for all within its borders. The very persistence of the EU shows that such respect can be achieved among states, which is no mean feat given the ghastly past century. The massive migration of Muslims tests whether such respect can be achieved across perceived civilizational divides. Here the jury is out.

After all, Muslims are Europe’s “perfect enemy”. They evoke the historical schemas of Saladin and Charles Martel, ready to be weaponized when useful. And they are suspected as deep-down radicals, who at the right moment will show their true colors. The problem is not that there are no dangers, but that commentators treat Muslims as essentially the same, as defined by putatively fixed characteristics of their religion.

Of course, Muslims are not the only targets of what the philosopher Charles Taylor has called “block thinking”. Treating Jews, Roma, Irish, and so forth as “races”, defined by an immutable essence, has long been the basis for everyday discrimination and mass murder. But today Muslims are the main collective target for everyday character assassination. It has become usual for journalists and politicians to slip from using “radical” to “Islamist” to “militant” when writing of those Muslims deemed not to be playing the state’s precise integration game. They do not adapt, and we can never be sure precisely what they think. And there are more specific claims of otherness. One regards children.

Fearing birth

Since the carnage of the world wars, repeopling the nation has been a matter of national urgency across Europe. If not enough citizens could be grown quickly enough, then workers would be imported as economic placeholders. But when many of these “workers” came to be seen as “Muslims”, they also became a threat, and not a solution, to the peopling problem.

Critics claim a visceral demographic threat, that “they” will soon replace “us”, and thereby accomplish by stealth the conquest of Europe first attempted over a millennium ago. The attacks also have both a general and a nation-specific component, corresponding as they do to the particular historical narratives of citizenship in France, Germany, Britain, and so forth.