Cartoon trouble in Copenhagen

Hygge," explained Danish newspaper editor Anne Knudsen to a group of American and Danish students last June — fellows of the human rights program Humanity in Action — is a distinctly Danish concept that cannot be translated. It means coziness, eating and drinking together, and feeling good in a small group. It is a cultural model, she argued, that reflects Danish society's uneasy relationship with diversity. The stability of the close-knit social group — and the sweet sentiments and comforts generated by it — seem threatened by those who do not belong.

That the spread of cartoons making fun of the Prophet Muhammad, published last September in the Danish daily "Jyllands-Posten," has resulted in violent protests across the Middle East says a lot about the increasing power of global communication. Barry Caro wrote in The Daily Princetonian on Feb. 15, 2006, that the controversy is part of a "titanic struggle" to save free speech. The West, he wrote, might actually win this battle. The idea of a mighty war between the freedom-loving West and the embassy-burning Muslims of the world misses the point that many of the angry Muslims are actually Europeans.

This is a European struggle, it should be remembered and it has been taking place for decades. It is partly a legacy of the Western European dream that guest workers would come to work in European cities and magically disappear once they were not needed anymore. While the point about the dangers of fundamentalism is important, this string of sad events reveals Europe's own failures, in addition to exposing the unacceptable expressions of violence in the Middle East. Pointing to European failures does not make violence permissible; it ought to open up a discussion of the troubled vision of European integration and not hide the implications of the events behind the scary image of a civilizational Armageddon.

The struggle for a vision of plurality in Western Europe has not produced a coherent plan that recognizes minorities as an essential part of the European social fabric. Senior observers of the EU are probably shaking their heads dismissing this last incident as the normal result of a democratic process. After all, that is what many of them argued when Paris was in flames for entire weeks last year.

But are these not the signs of deepening cleavages within Western European countries? Was it not Denmark-based imams who traveled through the Middle East to publicize the images and stir protests? What seems to be a banal incident actually reveals that the "problem with Muslims" may actually be a problem with Europe. The culture clashes are not part of some imaginary war between empires, they are daily struggles of ordinary Europeans in cities like Copenhagen.

The incident reminds me of a meeting with Danish comedian Farshad Kholghi last June. Kholghi finds it outrageous that immigrants' children who were born in Denmark don't speak Danish. Leftist Danish leaders, he said, called him an extremist for being "insensitive" to the immigrants' difficulties. When he produced a comedy skit on the Qur'anic reference of the heavenly prize of virgins for martyrs — the same subject of one of the recent cartoons — he said that he received threats from angry Muslims. Everyone seems to hate him these days.

That Kholghi's comedy can provoke and offend, just like the published cartoons, is not surprising. The point is that critical voices within immigrant communities are caught between the visible crisis of European leftist politicians and the increasing extremism among Muslim religious leaders.

It is a familiar story repeated across Western Europe: radical right-wing parties get more votes in national elections because people, once released from the overburdening political correctness of the left, can finally "say things openly." The Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was the astonishing example of this resurgence of intentional political incorrectness. On the other extreme was the murder of director Theo van Gogh by a second-generation immigrant. Almost everyone agrees that there is a complex problem here, but no one seems to know how to talk about it.

Moderate European Muslims are in a vulnerable position. When Lord Ashdown, the EU's convoy in Bosnia, talked about the integration of the Balkans into the EU recently, he said it would not be in Europe's interest to have "a source of conflict and drugs" in the region. Embracing the Balkans and European Muslims out of fear that they might otherwise breed violence, reveals a colonialist attitude that actually creates a picture of an inevitable clash between civilizations. Elidor Mehilli is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program in the Department of History. He can be reached at emehilli@princeton.edu.