Economist
Oct 20 2006
Free speech under threat
Oct 19th 2006
>>From The Economist print edition
What Britain’s debate about the Islamic veil has in common with
France’s bill on Armenian genocide
IN 1999 Jack Straw, then Britain’s home secretary, was attacked for
being rude about an ethnic minority. There were demands for criminal
investigations, appeals to various commissions and public agencies, a
fevered debate over whether Mr Straw was racist. On that occasion, he
was accused of demeaning gypsies by saying that people who
masqueraded as travellers seemed to think they had a right to commit
crimes. In the past few weeks Mr Straw, now leader of the House of
Commons, has triggered a similar response by arguing that the Muslim
veil (ie, the full, face-covering niqab) is an unhelpful symbol of
separateness. This week he won the backing of his boss, Tony Blair.
These episodes are reminders not that Mr Straw is hostile to
minorities (he isn’t) but that any debate in Europe about minority
rights soon degenerates into a fight between self-proclaimed
community leaders, public agencies, the police, courts and the law.
It may be hard to reconcile militant Islam with secular Europe. But
Europeans have fostered a culture, legal system and set of
institutions that have a chilling effect on public debate, making it
hard to discuss the subject honestly.
The starting-point of this failure, argues Gerard Alexander, at the
American Enterprise Institute, is a surprising one: Holocaust-denial
laws. At the height of this year’s row over cartoons of Muhammad in a
Danish newspaper, devout Muslims argued that, if it was right to
limit free speech in one area, it was right to do it in another. They
wanted insulting the Prophet to be made a crime.
Restrictions on free speech are always undesirable. Holocaust-denial
laws may have been justified in Germany and Austria because they
helped to stop something even worse: a revival of Nazism. Yet that is
surely no longer a risk in either country. And it certainly does not
justify the extension of such laws to other countries where there is
no real threat of Nazism, such as France and Belgium; or the adoption
of "hate speech" legislation that has nothing to do with Nazism; or
the interpretation of laws against incitement to violence in a way
that constrains speech which merely causes offence.
The most vivid example of the creeping extension of Holocaust-denial
laws has come in the French National Assembly, which last week voted
for a bill to make denial of the genocide of Armenians in Turkey
during the first world war a criminal offence. The political context
for this was not just vociferous lobbying by Armenians in France but
also growing hostility among voters to the idea of Turkish membership
of the European Union. To appeal to such voters, the assembly proved
ready to place restrictions on one of the most fundamental of all
freedoms, that of speech (though in fact the bill is unlikely to
become law).
This is a perfectly logical extension of a slew of laws imposing
free-speech restrictions to suppress racial, ethnic and religious
hatred. Indeed, it may be an offence to deny the Armenian genocide in
France already, because its Holocaust-denial law was extended in 1990
to cover all crimes against humanity. Bernard Lewis, an American
historian, was condemned by a French court in 1995 under this law.
Britain also has laws against incitement to racial hatred; last
January it tried but failed to extend them to religious hatred. On
the face of it, then, it does not seem outlandish for Muslims to
demand that Islam be equally "protected" under speech-restricting
laws.
Laws against racial and religious hatred are often defended on the
ground that they are directed at racists and xenophobes. Certainly,
they have been used against such people. In 2004 Belgium’s highest
court found a Flemish far-right party, the Vlaams Blok, guilty of
racism, forcing it to disband (though it regrouped under a new name).
But such laws have not been restricted to the far right; they have
been used against pillars of society. Mr Lewis is a frequent guest of
both the Jordanian royal family and the White House. Last year, a
French court found Le Monde, the grande dame of French newspapers,
guilty of inciting hatred against Jews. Oriana Fallaci, one of
Italy’s best-known journalists, was awaiting trial for offending
Islam when she died. Such lawsuits do not discourage racists; they
discourage free speech.
Fighting for the right to speak
As always happens, an industry grows up around any such laws (and
lawsuits), dedicated to policing, sustaining and extending the legal
framework. The industry consists of government bodies, such as
Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality, which investigate
complaints; official agencies, such as France’s Conseil Superieur de
l’Audiovisuel, which monitor the media for racist remarks; and any
number of informal organisations that represent minorities and win
their spurs by doing battle with the political establishment.
Laws against incitement to hatred tend to hamper openness of debate
because they are too easily interpreted as laws against causing
offence. The placing of sanctions on "offensive" speech risks
conflating two different things: bigoted speech and constructive
criticism. The big danger is that, in the name of stopping bigots,
one may end up stopping all criticism.
The outcome is an odd combination, whereby Europe simultaneously
suppresses but also radicalises its debate about Islam. Acts of
self-censorship co-exist with fevered argument. Spain’s folklore
festivals may rid themselves of medieval depictions of Muhammad and
the Deutsche Oper in Berlin may cancel a production for fear of
Islamist reprisals. But at the same time, extremists exploit
arguments over the veil in Britain or over the pope’s reference to a
14th-century Byzantine emperor.
The good news is that politicians have begun to recognise the risk of
stifling debate. Germany’s Angela Merkel criticised the opera house
for self-censorship. Most of Mr Straw’s cabinet colleagues, and not
only Mr Blair, have rallied to support him. They are right to. It is
hard to integrate Muslims into European society. Restricting free
speech makes it even harder.