GERARD ALEXANDER: EUROPE’S NEW SPEECH LAWS ATTACK DEMOCRACY

Dallas Morning News, TX
April 16 2006

Three disturbing trends now under way in Europe together represent
the greatest erosion of democratic practice in the world’s advanced
democracies since 1945.

First, anti-Nazi laws are being adopted in places where neo-Nazism
poses no serious threat. Second, speech laws have been dramatically
expanded to sanction speech that “incites hatred” against groups
based on their religion, race, ethnicity or other characteristics.

Third, these incitement laws are being interpreted so loosely that
they chill not just extremist views, but mainstream ones, too.

The result is a serious distortion and impoverishment of political
debate.After 1945, Germany passed strict anti-Nazi laws. Given what
had happened between 1933 and 1945, it seemed like airing pro-Nazi
or anti-Semitic views was the equivalent of shouting “Fire!” in the
crowded theater of Austria and Germany’s troubled cultures. As it
turned out, of course, neo-Nazis proved too marginal even to come
close to posing a danger to Germany or Austria’s new democracies,
with real neo-Nazis never winning even 5 percent of the vote. So the
necessity for these restrictions became less clear with time.

But instead of being pared back, anti-Nazi legislation spread,
gradually expanding to cover other historical events. In 1993, the
eminent Princeton historian Bernard Lewis told France’s Le Monde that
he questioned whether the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey was the
result of a predetermined – that is, genocidal – plan. Dr. Lewis was
later found guilty in a civil suit for having not been “objective”
regarding events that the European Parliament and other bodies had
officially certified as a “genocide.” Genocide-denial laws can now
be used to sanction professional historians whose research leads them
to unacceptable findings.

And the anti-Nazi slope has proved more slippery than that. Denial
laws have been supplemented by new laws that are even more prone to
sanctioning reasonable people.

Especially since the 1970s, Western Europeans have been passing
bans on any speech that “incites hatred” based on race, religion,
ethnicity, national origin and other criteria. This is spreading
to the European Union level, where a stream of rules now prohibits
the broadcast, including online, of any program or ad that incites
“hatred based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief,
disability, age or sexual orientation” or – crucially – is “offensive
to religious or political beliefs.”

The real danger posed by Europe’s speech laws is not so much
guilty verdicts as a chilling of political debate, as people censor
themselves in order to avoid legal charges and the stigma and expense
they bring. And the most serious chill is not of fringe racists but
of mainstream moderates and conservatives when anti-incitement laws
are allowed to sanction speech that causes “offense.”

After all, two views tend to cause offense in our day and age. The
first is the speech of bigots who denigrate members of other groups.

The second is speech by modern moderates and conservatives who believe
that problems like poverty, delinquency and poor health can often be
traced to bad choices and dysfunctional subcultures. And problems have
sooner or later been disproportionately concentrated within groups
of every race, ethnicity and religion. Identifying these causes is
a prerequisite to improvement. That isn’t bigotry, but it sometimes
causes offense to sensitized members of affected groups.

Laws against any speech that causes “offense” have the insidious effect
of conflating bigoted speech and constructive criticism. The result is
the stigmatization of certain kinds of thinking about social problems
and public policy that American conservatives, moderates and even many
liberals recognize as a legitimate part of serious debate. These speech
laws won’t ultimately silence extremists, whose careers won’t end
if they’re called bigots. But they can silence reasonable people who
don’t want that label and don’t want a scandal. Mainstream European
journalists, politicians and academics have already been charged
under these laws for just such constructive criticism.

The good news is that Europeans are questioning their illiberal
speech laws as never before. Such skepticism received a huge boost
from the events surrounding the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. Many
Muslims are insisting that European governments ban such cartoons
as they ban other “offensive” speech. In response, some Europeans
ask whether their governments shouldn’t get out of the business of
banning political speech altogether.

Europeans of all political stripes should seize this opportunity
to reverse the most dangerously illiberal trend in the world’s
advanced democracies. That would cease to make Europe a role model
for censorship and restore it as a model of core democratic rights,
expanding and not contracting Europe’s moral authority in the world.

Gerard Alexander is associate professor of political science at the
University of Virginia. A longer version of this essay appeared in
The Weekly Standard. His e-mail address is galexander@aei.org.