Europe’s Scared of the Spring

On a backstreet in Marseilles, a French flag adorns the facade of the row of houses where revolutionaries in 1792 first began singing “La Marseillaise,” their hymn against tyranny. The Memorial of the Marseillaise opened this spring as a monument to freedom — the rights of people to speak out, determine their own fates and elect their own governments — and embraces France’s official version of itself as a guardian of liberté, égalité and fraternité. The gift shop sells T-shirts with revolutionary slogans: AUX ARMES, CITOYENS! (“To arms, citizens!”) and VIVRE LIBRE OU MOURIR (“Live free or die”).

In the heavily Arab neighborhood outside, the focus is on more recent revolutions just across the Mediterranean. On a recent Sunday, the television in a grocery store was tuned to al-Jazeera for the latest headlines from Egypt. Tattered posters announced a Free Palestine rally. The long-distance-call shop was full of families phoning back to the Maghreb for news. For Abdel Kader, 20, manning the till, the new memorial to “La Marseillaise” seemed irrelevant — or worse. “I don’t sing ‘The Marseillaise,'” says Kader. “Listen to the words: ‘Let impure blood water our furrows’? Those words hurt.”

(See “Europe Hails the Arab Protests, but Fears a Flood of Migrants.”)

Europe’s self-image as the realm of freedom was long burnished by the corresponding perception of the Arab world, just across the sea, as a land of tyranny and stagnation. But the Arab Spring changed everything. Suddenly the old formula has collapsed. Europe no longer holds a Mediterranean monopoly on freedom and democracy. The Egyptian protesters who toppled a despot in 18 days look rather more efficient than, say, those in Italy, where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s corruption trials grind on. The Arab quest for freedom comes at a moment when many European Arabs feel their own freedoms are under fire, whether because of the French ban on burqas or the rising tide of antimigrant rhetoric from political leaders.

(Watch a TIME video on Tunisia’s rebellion.)

Arabs accuse Europe, as much as the U.S., of long having enabled Middle Eastern despots. “We must show humility about the past,” admits Stefan Füle, European Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighbourhood Policy. “Too many of us fell prey to the assumption that authoritarian regimes were a guarantee of stability in the region.” Years of cozy relations with dictators like Tunisia’s Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak undermined Europe’s claims to be championing democracy, and European businesses loved doing crony deals with political insiders.

If Europe’s reputation among Arabs was tainted by its ties to the old regimes, it can hardly have been redeemed by Europe’s reaction to the Arab Spring. By rights, this should have been Europe’s shining moment. Rebuilding societies after wars, communism or despots: that’s what Europe does well. But whereas the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 showed Europe’s ability to expand and embrace its neighbors, the Arab Spring made it look old, scared and confused. Like the Obama Administration, many European governments were slow to recognize the strength of the protest movements and waited too long to support them. “At first, both the U.S. and the E.U. reacted very hesitantly and completely inadequately,” says Rime Allaf, an expert in Arab affairs at the British think tank Chatham House. “Now they’ve come to their senses and are thinking of their own interests. I wonder whether being quiet wasn’t better.” When tyrants like Ben Ali and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi cracked down on the protests, sending many fleeing across the Mediterranean in search of refuge, many Europeans showed little sympathy.

(See “Italy’s Troubling Immigration Deal with Gaddafi.”)

Ventimiglia, on the Italian Riviera, is Grace Kelly country, with palms and fountains, where old ladies promenade past artisan-chocolate shops. But during April, the town found itself hosting hundreds of young Tunisian men who’d fled by boat for Europe. After landing on the island of Lampedusa, they had traveled up Italy to Ventimiglia, hoping to cross into bordering France to find work or relatives there. For weeks, France refused to allow them in. At night, if they weren’t lucky enough to get one of the beds in the emergency Red Cross shelter, the men slept on the streets and washed in the train station. By day, they’d huddle in cafés, hoping to hear that France would agree to take them. “When I was little, I thought Europe was magnificent,” says Saif, 27, a Tunisian who fled his home in Kebili. “But this is not the Europe I imagined.”

France and Italy bickered for weeks over who should house some 26,000 migrants — shaking the foundations of the Schengen agreement, which allows citizens free movement through the region — before France opened its doors. The European Commission is likely to allow countries to install border controls in “exceptional circumstances.” The new mood is easily explained. “Because of the financial crisis, the massive enlargement [from Eastern Europe] and globalization, it’s a moment when many European public spaces are rabidly inward-looking,” says Kerem Öktem, a fellow at the European Studies Centre at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. But such excuses don’t impress Arabs, who point out that Egypt and Tunisia — much poorer than France or Italy and beset with huge problems of their own — took in more than 100,000 refugees fleeing Libya’s war.

(See “Hundreds More Die at Sea Fleeing North Africa for Europe.”)

The Revolution at Home
Yet the Arab spring revealed not only a divide between the two sides of the Mediterranean but also the links across it. The most obvious bridges are the millions of Arab Europeans, many of them facing the same frustrations as their cousins across the sea: uncertain job and housing prospects. If the Arab revolts challenged the system of wasta, or connections, in the Middle East, some Arab Europeans complain of a European version based not on family or tribe but ethnicity. “I’m getting a degree in science and sport, but when I go look for work experience, they see the name Abdel Kader, and I don’t get an interview,” says the call-shop cashier in Marseilles. “They want someone blond with blue eyes.” According to the OECD, in 2009 foreign-born workers in France were 1.7 times as likely to be unemployed as the general population, and 2.4 times as likely in Austria, Belgium and Norway. In 2005, the youth in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco watched on satellite TV as their cousins in France embarked on their own revolution: that autumn, young minorities in the banlieues — suburban housing estates — rioted against their exclusion from French society. “Youth here have exactly the same problems with the questions of democracy as in the Maghreb,” says Mahmoud Rezzouali, the youth-affairs coordinator at the Muslim Center of Marseilles, a community center with a mosque and a religious school. “They don’t feel free here.”

See TIME’s special report “The Middle East in Revolt.”

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.

It’s not just the freedom to find decent work. Under France’s rigorous commitment to laïcité, or secularism, it can be a lack of freedom of thought and speech. Rezzouali tells of girls removing their headscarves at the school gates to comply with French laws on religious symbols, only to be berated because their skirts were too long. A Muslim schoolboy he knows wrote an admiring essay on a Victor Hugo poem. His teacher then criticized him for bringing Islam into the classroom: the poem praised the Prophet Muhammad.

Other European Arabs have felt their freedoms curtailed by the long reach of Arab dictators’ security services. In France, the Tunisian community was cowed into silence because of Ben Ali’s vast network of informants, says Ahmed Nadjar, of the online journal med’in Marseille. “They kept quiet, maybe even sold information, because they were afraid for their families back in Tunisia,” he says. Libyans were intimidated by Gaddafi’s 1980s “stray dogs” campaign, in which his agents killed Europe-based Libyan dissidents.

(See photos of refugees overwhelming Italy’s Lampedusa.)

That began to change when antiregime protests broke out across North Africa. Abdulla Boulsien was raised in London and Malta by a Libyan father who’d cut off all ties to the country. “We’d never socialize with other Libyans, and we’d never talk about anything political, even amongst friends,” he says. “Since this spring, I’ve met more Libyans than we ever knew existed here. Everyone’s talking freely. Now, it’s ‘Put down the Mad Dog.'” Many European Arabs returned to their ancestral homelands to participate in the protests — or stayed to rebuild after them. Four Ministers in Tunisia’s current Cabinet left banking jobs in London and Paris to build the new government. New groups of French Tunisians have sprung up to promote business and political interests, including the right of expats to have parliamentary representation in Tunisia. “The real break is generational,” says Vincent Geisser, a French expert in Maghreb politics. “Where the older generation is interested in France, the younger ones are now looking to Tunisia.”

That’s in part because unlike their parents, they’ve grown up in a world of mobile phones, budget flights and the Internet. “Because of Twitter and Facebook, the relationships between the diaspora and their countries of origin are permanent,” says Michel Peraldi, an anthropologist specializing in the Mediterranean political economy. Tarek Klabi, 31, a Marseilles helicopter engineer of Tunisian parentage, says he got his revolutionary news from sites like A Tunisian Girl, a blog by a young woman covering Tunisia’s uprising. He founded a group, Collectif Solidarité Maghreb, to rally French-based support of the revolutionaries, organizing demonstrations of thousands in Marseilles via text and Facebook. After Ben Ali’s fall, he founded a small NGO online to build schools in Tunisia. But it’s not just the news from the Maghreb that excites him: the Arab Spring, he says, has raised expectations among young French Arabs that change is possible north of the Mediterranean. “After we’ve seen what’s happened in Tunisia, there was a thought of, What can we do in France?” Klabi says. A Tahrir Square-style uprising isn’t what he has in mind, he says, “but perhaps we can make a change.” With French Tunisians feeling “less hidden, more proud,” he says, he’s hoping they will speak out on issues they feel target them, like the burqa ban and President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent national debate on secularism.

(See pictures of immigration in Europe.)

A New Beginning
Can Europe atone for past mistakes in the Arab world? NATO’s campaign against Libya’s Gaddafi may help: rebels in Benghazi have offered prayer and praise for U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and Sarkozy. So too could Europe’s contribution to rebuilding the revolution-ravaged economies of Egypt and Tunisia, topped up in late May by the G-8’s pledge of $20 billion in aid. But the Arabs have seen big checks and big talk about support of democracy before, since the E.U. launched the Euro-Mediterranean partnership in 1995. This time around, the trick will lie in ensuring that money doesn’t merely line the pockets of a new political elite.

It will take a fundamental change in the way Europe views the Arab world for a new cross-Mediterranean relationship to blossom. “Until now, Europe has looked at the Arab region as a useful geography, a useful geology and a good market,” says Bichara Khader, director of the University of Louvain’s Center for Study and Research of the Modern Arab World. “Now we have to change the lens. Rather than paternalism, they have to be partners in looking to a common prosperity.”

(See a brief history of people power.)

For the past decade, fears of terrorism, smuggling and migration have blotted out attempts to reconcile the differences between the shores of the Mediterranean. Europe is aging, while an estimated 65% of the Middle Eastern and North African populations are under 30. Europe increasingly needs workers; Arabs need jobs but often can’t get visas. “We must change how we look at the 175 million young Arabs at our doorstep,” says Khader. “They’re not a peril for our culture and our security but could be an asset for our development. The future of Europe lies to the South.”

The best place to start may be right at home. “There is a newly diverse European population, linked to the Maghreb by its origins,” says Mustapha Dali, an imam of the mosque in Cannes, who with his beard, vest and granny glasses looks like the Sorbonne-educated ’68er he is. “This diversity is [Europe’s] good luck.”

See TIME’s special report “The Middle East in Revolt.”

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.