Perhaps the most awkward truth to be confronted in the battle against Islamism is that to be ‘born and raised here’ does not produce an equivalence with ‘meaningfully belonging’.
Citizenship and residency can be dry and technical – something handed out as a result of filling in forms, or by birth – or it can be a meaningful sign of commitment, and an emotional concept where the very idea that some citizens can have that status stripped from us fills people with horror. It cannot be both.
The current tension results from nations using the first concept to issue citizenship, while perceiving it as the second. We know perfectly well that being born somewhere does not give rise to integration as if by magic, or even identification with the country of birth; Boris Johnson, prior to giving up his citizenship, could not be described as particularly American. That we agree to pretend that it does seems to be a way for our political classes to avoid confronting the reality that we have allowed the development of hostile Islamist communities in our nations, creating a problem of separatism to which no clear solution is on offer.
Addressing this problem will clearly require significant policy changes. Filtering out those potential migrants who hold Islamist views, reducing inflows to ensure that arrivals are immersed in their new host society, adopting policies explicitly aiming to enforce adoption of the national way of life, refusing to extend leave to remain to those who fail to integrate – there are tools available to governments that wish to use them.
Dealing with it today requires the recognition that being a citizen or resident of a nation does not always imply a person meaningfully belonging to that nation’s culture. In communities where integration has failed to the point of allowing Islamism to take root – an ideology that demands a fundamental allegiance to a supranational community over and above any duty to the nation – there are people who are not in any meaningful sense a part of the country that surrounds them.
Deradicalisation of would-be terrorists is at best an inexact science. Dismantling the community networks that protect and nurture the views that give rise to extremism is a better option than dealing with the consequences once it has arrived. Preachers teaching children born in Britain to hate their countrymen and radicals determined to provoke conflict between groups should be removed before they can do harm whenever the option is open to us.
Some governments are, slowly, beginning to come to this conclusion. Sajid Javid’s decision to strip Shamima Begum and Jack Letts of their citizenship can be seen as an early step on this path, as can President Macron’s government starting the process to expel 231 foreigners on an extremism watchlist. At the moment use of deportation is piecemeal at best, with politicians playing to the gallery. But these actions are at least bringing the idea that citizenship brings obligations as well as rights into the mainstream dialogue.
Making greater use of deportation unlikely to meet with the raucous approval of the legal profession, and in particular those parts of it making a living tying up the state’s ability to remove anyone from its shores. Neutering the ability of activists to clog up the system with repeated appeals or time-wasting tactics would be a necessary precondition for doing so. Ultimately the state must respect the rights of its citizens, including the right to live in safety; placing the rights of extremists above those of their future victims is fundamentally unjust.
And ultimately it is important to remember the aim of selective deportations is to allow communities to live alongside one another peacefully, without the agitations of extremists. The explicit aim of ISIS was to eliminate the ‘grey zones’ of coexistence between the Muslim and Western worlds, an aim founded in a fundamental fact of human psychology.
People will not stand to see their cathedrals burned, their citizens slaughtered, and their children bombed to pieces rather than accept that failures of integration require action rather than passive acceptance. Violence, as history tells us, begets violence. It is far easier to attempt to break the cycle before it begins than to arrest it once it is in motion.
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