Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (57 page)

Impoverishment had its own geography. As the old industrial heartlands—the Clyde and the north-east of England, the Ruhr—fell into decline, jobs and people tilted towards the suburbs or other regions. In 1980s Germany, for instance, there was the “Nord-Sud Gefälle”—the Great Trek to the South. The destitution of the Italian Mezzogiorno contrasted more strikingly than ever with the wealth of the Veneto and Emilia, whose inhabitants’ protectionism expressed itself in large votes for the autonomist
Lega
. Those left behind found themselves stranded in pockets of high unemployment. People started to talk of “inner cities” as zones of social tension and poverty. Within cities, housing patterns also changed as those in work abandoned public housing estates: by the 1990s, council houses were inhabited overwhelmingly by the poor, something which had not been true a decade or so earlier. Homelessness was on the increase too, and by the early 1990s had reached the staggering figure of three million across the European Union.

As poverty increased, and the gulf widened between those in and out of work, prison populations also rose—unevenly but persistently—across western Europe. We need not follow Marxist penologists who argue that capitalism uses prison as a means of labour discipline and a way of keeping public order, to see possible connections between social distress and a return to hardline law-and-order policies. As ever, the poor were most at risk of imprisonment; white-collar theft, corruption and fraud were rarely regarded as “real” crimes, despite the enormous sums of money involved—£6 billion from EU subsidies alone. Effectively, the crimes of the economically powerful were left to the margins of policing work.

So far as crime was concerned, there were two possibilities: either the figures were unreliable or there actually was more crime. The unreliability of crime figures was acknowledged on all sides, but few believed that statistics alone explained the increase. Were people behaving worse than in the past, or had definitions of what constituted criminal behaviour changed so that more kinds of acts were now being defined as criminal? Conservatives preferred the first kind of explanation; radicals the second.

In fact, of course, the two are not incompatible, and while it was difficult to prove moral deterioration (except through markers such as the rise in violent crime), there was some evidence of a tendency to criminalize new kinds of behaviour, such as homelessness, trespass, peaceful protest and vagrancy. Social policy was hopelessly confused where drugs were concerned—criminalizing possession of cannabis, for example, but not alcohol or tobacco. The radical critique was justified in targeting economic factors, even if they worked less mechanistically than was often suggested. It was true that unemployment played a part in pushing prison rates up, but mostly because it increased
re
-conviction rates (i.e. it made it harder for prisoners to find work when they were released from prison), and because the unemployed found it difficult to pay fines.

At the same time, the consumer society—with its car radios and mobile phones—generated new temptations and attitudes to crime. So did the welfare state itself: government publicity campaigns targeted benefit fraud—trying to reassure taxpayers that their money was not being squandered—and called on the public to inform on cheats. At
the most general level, some argued that the alienation of modern life led people to treat one another with suspicion and to rely on the law to settle disputes which might once have been settled privately. But though this may be true, it remains difficult to see how such a long-term explanation could help explain a relatively recent surge in crime.

In fact, comparison among European countries also shows no clear relationship between crime and incarceration rates. The latter varied enormously, and some countries were far keener to send people to jail than others. European prison populations were proportionately far lower than in the Soviet Union (let alone the USA), and west European rates lower than east European, though rising fast. But in general there was a startling upward trend in prison populations: between 1979 and 1993 the number of prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants rose, for example, in the Netherlands, from 23 to 52, from 44 to 62 in Norway and from 37 to 117 in Spain. The UK had the highest rate in western Europe, and this too rose under the increasingly draconian policies of successive Conservative governments. The Norwegian Nils Christie saw Europe moving “towards GULAGs, Western style” and warned of the dangers of ending up with a crime-control industry on an American scale. Yet some of the symptoms are here already—a buoyant private security industry, the emergence of electronic tagging and other means of surveillance as prisons became overcrowded.
²⁵

The new conservative mood of the 1980s could be seen particularly clearly in the Netherlands, traditionally a country reluctant to imprison criminals. This reluctance had been led by a wartime generation of judges whose own experiences during the occupation had given them a deep aversion to incarceration. Now they were passing into retirement just when social engineering and social reformism more generally were being called into question. In March 1994 an official announcement from the Ministry of Justice noted that “punishing is again ‘allowed,’ and the legitimation of penal sanctions is no longer sought in its resocializing effect, but again in incapacitation and retribution as well.” The conservative trend even reached Sweden in the early 1990s, where the centre-right fought the 1991 election with the slogan: “Keep them locked in, so we can go out!”
²⁶
And there was also an inescapable racial dimension: the proportion of foreign and ethnic minority prisoners shot up alarmingly in the 1980s. By 1987 they amounted to nearly a third of the prison population in Belgium and France, and above a third in Switzerland. Rates of increase were staggeringly high in countries like Spain and Portugal. Many people were in prison for breaches of immigration law, and in Belgium one third of foreigners detained were in jail “for administrative reasons as a measure of social defence.”
²⁷

In some cases this increase reflected the social situation of certain ethnic groups—with higher levels of drug use, or higher rates of unemployment—as well as pervasive racism in the ranks of the police. Although there was much dispute about the reasons, there was no doubt that ethnic minorities were disproportionately afflicted both by unemployment and by imprisonment. In the UK, for instance, the unemployment rate among young black men in London reached a staggering 51 per cent in the early 1990s, and was 37 per cent across all ethnic minorities. It was hard to believe that these statistics did not reflect—among other factors—the persistence of racial prejudice, and a reluctance to admit the members of minorities (as indeed was still the case for women, too) as full citizens in west European society.

With the rise of unemployment, European states threw their previously welcoming immigration policies into reverse. In most countries, the 1970s marked the end of mass immigration and the beginning of restriction. The French Office of National Immigration (founded in 1946) was renamed the International Migration Office, and sought to encourage return. Yet ethnic-minority populations of course did not decline and policies to encourage repatriation made little impact. In West Germany, for instance, neither Helmut Schmidt’s “consolidation policy” nor Kohl’s “return policy” were effective in reducing numbers: 17,000 migrants took up Kohl’s offer, while the number of foreigners in the country increased by nearly two million in his first decade in office.
²⁸

After 1989, new fears emerged of a flood of migrants from the East. Amid predictions that millions of impoverished former Communist-bloc workers would head for the Golden Land of the West, the European Union states tightened immigration controls and asylum laws still further. Immigration and refugee issues were often conflated,
casting doubt on the bona fides of refugee applicants, who were increasingly portrayed in the press as scroungers on Western generosity.

Such anxieties were not entirely groundless: asylum seekers in western Europe rose from 65,400 in 1983 to 544,000 in 1991, and rose further with the war in Bosnia; Germany alone took some 80 per cent of the total. Once granted asylum, they generally received benefits and entitlements. Yet wealthy western Europe hosted a rather small share of the world’s total refugee population, most of whom were settled in much poorer parts of the globe—some six and a half million in Asia, for example, and four million in Africa. Countries like Iran and Pakistan hosted far greater numbers of refugees both absolutely and proportionately to their total population than relatively generous European states like Sweden and West Germany, let alone misers like the UK.

As a rather ineffective deterrent, conditions for hosting refugees were made deliberately unattractive. They were housed in camps, detention centres, old barracks and elderly offshore rustbuckets. In some cases, rights to welfare assistance and benefits were whittled away. At the same time they were often prevented from working. Not surprisingly, they were pushed into the black economy and various forms of illegality. The numbers of those refused asylum rose, yet most remained nonetheless. By the early 1990s it was estimated that there were some three million undocumented foreigners in western Europe. Occasional amnesties were one way of regularizing their plight; another was the mass deportations of tens of thousands of illegal workers and residents carried out in Italy, Greece and France. Particularly hard hit were those affected by retrospective changes in citizenship laws who faced deportation and separation from their own children.

The persistent and indeed increased attention paid to refugees and immigrants was linked to the racial hostility which the members of minority communities settled in western Europe continued to endure on a daily basis. The situation of different minorities varied considerably, while despite (or because of) the high unemployment rates they faced, many of the second and third generation were staying on into higher education and becoming at least as well educated (and in the
British case generally better) than the white population as a whole. Yet these and other favourable social trends do not obscure the persistence of racism.

Even in the UK, with the most substantial race-relations legislation in the EU, racial harassment—especially outside the major cities—was a serious and growing problem. “Harlow is a very racist town,” said a young black man who grew up there. “It’s a minority of white people who give us the trouble, but the others don’t stop them … I’ve not been into the town centre since 1991. We’re actually prisoners.” Embattled minorities had to choose—as ever—between relying on the protection of a police force that was itself riddled with racism, bowing to street violence, or self-defence. Suicide rates were high. “I’ve been bullied about it for ten years,” said one sixteen-year-old. “I feel like killing myself sometimes.”
²⁹

Outside the UK, levels of racism were higher and much less inhibited. British publishers of children’s books found illustrations showing non-white children reduced sales abroad, and routinely changed the pictures as a result. “What bothers me with English books,” said one French publisher, “is that there are lots of children from different cultures. We do have our different races here, but the public don’t want to buy books which represent them.” France’s republican ideal of assimilation meant that ethnic diversity was seen in negative terms as something which should disappear; few gloried openly in their immigrant past, or appreciated that without immigration France’s population in the 1990s would have been one fifth smaller than it was.
³⁰

In central Europe old attitudes still ran close to the surface. In West Germany, sixteen university professors in 1982 signed a manifesto calling for the deportation of all migrant workers in order to preserve “the Christian Occidental values of Europe.” The lack of effective laws in many countries outlawing racial discrimination allowed flats to be advertised “Only for Europeans.” In xenophobic Switzerland there were grass-roots attacks on the “over-foreignization” (
Überfremdung
) of the country. Overall in western Europe, between 1984 and 1990 the European Parliament registered an alarming increase in racist attacks.
³¹

These trends were, of course, linked to the new salience of race and immigration issues in national politics. The 1980s saw avowedly
right-wing parties achieve national prominence for the first time in fifty years. In France the National Front linked the issues of immigration, unemployment and crime to become a national force in the mid-1980s; Le Pen, its leader, himself polled 14 per cent in the first round of the 1988 presidential elections. In West Germany, the Republican Party was formed in 1983 with a similar platform and polled around 11 per cent in 1992. A more violent neo-Nazi fringe seized the headlines both East and West after unification, and there was a spate of attacks on asylum seekers’ hostels. In Austria, the Freedom Party under Jörg Haider’s leadership rose on the back of the immigration issue. Its 1992 anti-immigration petition failed, but won the signatures of 417,000 voters. “Vienna must not become Chicago” was the FPÖ’s slogan in the Austrian capital—a curiously 1930s view of America, which bore out how little attitudes on race had changed across much of Europe in half a century.

In all this were echoes—visual and rhetorical—of inter-war fascism, and journalists flocked around young goose-stepping neo-Nazis like bees round honey. But history rarely repeats itself, and these groups had to struggle with the memory of their antecedents. No longer was it obvious that they had the key to the future; they could just as easily seem locked in the past. Anti-immigrant rhetoric boosted support for these parties, but also limited it, and the emergence of the Right prompted fierce opposition through organizations such as SOS-Racisme and the church sanctuary movement. Racism may have remained a powerful current in European attitudes, but anti-racism was also growing, and migrants’ rights were defensible in domestic courts. International human rights law could also be used to curb domestic restrictions, as in Austria where in 1985 the Foreigners Police Law was declared unconstitutional because it conflicted with the European Convention on Human Rights.