The Birth of Multicultural Europe

If multiculturalism ultimately became the primary trope through which Europeans debated ethnic diversity, it seems important to understand how this diversity developed in Europe in the first place. When, in other words, was multicultural Europe born? What economic and political motors drove large numbers of non-Europeans to settle in post–World War II Europe? And in what ways did different national histories, traditions, and ideas of belonging shape the diverse societies that developed — as well as the distinctive state responses to cultural diversity?

The standard answer to these questions is that Western European countries became diverse in the aftermath of the Second World War. Between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, colonial and former colonial subjects arrived in their European motherlands, while other European governments simultaneously recruited guest workers. In most cases, newcomers were welcomed — or at least tolerated — because they provided much needed manpower to help rebuild from wartime destruction and filled the massive labor shortage created by the subsequent economic boom. By and large, however, European states expected these labor migrants eventually to return home. That most remained took Western leaders by surprise. This unforeseen development, the narrative goes, forced European countries into the thankless position of having to absorb large numbers of people with foreign cultures, traditions, and religions.

Western European societies have a heavy investment in this version of the story. Before 1945, the account implies, countries in Europe enjoyed social cohesion and harmony, with few — if any — divisions. European nations were largely homogeneous and so had little or no experience dealing with cultural differences. Unlike the United States or Canada, European countries maintained neither a tradition of immigration, nor concepts of the nation that would facilitate incorporating significant foreign populations. The onset of postwar immigration, by contrast, introduced for the first time large numbers of non-Europeans into the demographic mix, which in turn forced a difficult learning curve for managing ethnic minorities and their cultural particularities. Within this narrative, the end of World War II represents a radical rupture in European society, one that helps to explain both native Europeans' resistance to the influx of immigrants, as well as the lack of preparedness among European leaders and governments to handle this social tinderbox. If 1945 marked a fundamental shift from homogeneity to diversity — and the first waves of nonwhite and non-Christian populations — then who could reasonably blame Europeans for the difficulties — and various forms of resistance — that often ensued?

The truth, however, is that this dominant image of European homogeneity was largely a myth. In fact, many scholars now argue that Europe has always been a study in contrasts, a continent marked by intense internal differences. European states accommodated — or at least, confronted — many kinds of diversity at multiple points in their histories: regional differences, religious differences, and ethnic and racial differences. In Germany, for instance, anxiety about foreign populations emerged as soon as the nation-state was established in 1871, with the incorporation of Danish Schleswig-Holstein and French Alsace-Lorraine into its territories. A diversity of religious confessions, too, was a concern for the new state. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck went to great lengths to monitor the Catholic population and ensure the dominance of Protestantism. Meanwhile, the "Jewish question" was already a major topic of debate in the German states well before unification, leading Karl Marx to pen his famous essay of the same title in 1843. Late nineteenth-century Germans, moreover, routinely worried about the flood of Polish laborers who crossed the border to work in the coal mines of the Ruhr Valley and the agricultural estates of East Prussia.

This long-running experience with ethnic and religious diversity holds true in France as well. In 1870, leaders of the Third Republic were sufficiently alarmed at the lack of social cohesion among the nominally French population that they undertook a major effort to define and inculcate a national culture. The goal was to transform peasants and regional minorities such as Basques and Bretons into "Frenchmen." In addition, France faced two substantial waves of immigration before the postwar period, one that brought Belgians and Italians at the end of the nineteenth century and another that created Polish, Czech, and Russian communities in the 1920s. The number of immigrants was so great, in fact, that by 1930 France boasted the highest rate of foreign population growth in the entire world.

The patterns in the United Kingdom were similar. If the mid-nineteenth-century Great Famine in Ireland prompted hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee to the United States, it also drove them to new parts of the British Isles: Liverpool, Birmingham, London. This mass immigration not only brought a huge underclass of laboring poor (whose "savagery" was said to rub off on English workers), but also reintroduced Catholicism as a potentially divisive factor into English society. The question of religious difference was raised in somewhat different form with the arrival of a sizable contingent of Jews around the same time. Significantly, the country's first immigration law, the 1905 Aliens Act, was aimed primarily at preventing the arrival of Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms in Russia's Pale of Settlement.

In contrast to most other European nations, the Netherlands actually welcomed immigrants prior to World War II. Between 1590 and 1800, newcomers relocated there in such numbers that the foreign-born population was never less than 5 percent, a sizeable figure compared to France, where foreigners composed 1.05 percent of the total population in 1851. The country's relative freedom and wealth attracted those fleeing religious persecution such as French Huguenots and Jews, as well as those seeking economic opportunity. In this way, the Netherlands embraced multiple types of migrants and made the tradition of accepting new arrivals an important part of its national identity.

Most European countries, in other words, dealt with questions of immigration and cultural difference well before the Second World War. Demographic diversity was not new. Nor were tensions around ethnic and religious difference a novel development in Western Europe. Yet this master narrative of postwar rupture contains at least some seeds of useful contrast. What is perhaps most significant here is that those living through the postwar transitions perceived the demographic...