That's because the attitude in America is to be American first and foremost, something black and white people take equal pride in. Let's not blame the victim here. Belgians have every right to be Belgian, as do the French. They should take pride in their identity, and there is no room for hyphens, or people who have loyalty to a religion, or some other identity outside of France or Belgium. Nobody would challenge this in China, India, Japan, Iran or elsewhere, just in Europe, where you get called a racist for having loyalty to the heritage of your freaking country. It needs to stop.
That's also the way I see it.
Colonial countries, including the whole American continent, Australia and New Zealand, have completely different attitudes to the whole concept of citizenship, because the majority of the population are immigrants from Europe, Africa or even Asia. But anywhere else in the world citizenship is perceived as something linked with ancestry and ethnicity.
One of the concepts I like about the EU is that is confers a broader EU citizenships to all citizens of member states. This allows to have a two-level concept of citizenship, in which people can see themselves as belonging to their part of Europe (member state, country, region or whatever you call it) AND belonging to a larger country called the European Union. This allows Europeans to set aside their historical differences and see themselves as part of a common society where anyone can move, live and work anywhere else in the EU. This is the foundation idea behind the EU.
However, even EU citizenship would, in my eyes, require at least partial European ancestry, with the added condition of being born in the EU or to at least one parent with EU citizenship. I would set the minimum European ancestry to around 25% (one grand parent) so that Turks, Iranians, upper-caste Indians and Central Asians who have between 10% and 20% of Bronze Age European ancestry do not automatically qualify if they were born in Europe from first generation immigrants.
Angela said:I'm not going to go into detail about all of this because I really don't believe in heaping criticism on a country in the middle of this kind of crisis, but if the prevailing attitude is that these people can only become "real" Belgians after seven generations in the country, then not only the immigrants are to blame for their alienation. Part of the blame for all of this lies also with the Belgian people and their attitudes. If this was going to be the attitude then these people should never have been allowed to immigrate to Europe.
I proposed 7 generations because practically any European can trace back their ancestry that far. For young people today, 7 generations means ancestors in the early to mid 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution, and after Napoleon imposed civil registries for births, marriages and deaths on over half of Europe. Seven generations of ancestors is also what modern inhabitants of Rome consider necessary for someone to be accepted as a "native Roman" (or so I was told when I was studying in Rome). The idea of seven generations has long had a symbolic value in many cultures.
Seven generations is also long enough for practically any migrant family to have intermarried with locals and absorbed local language and culture (I would hope). So far we can see that many Maghrebi families are still not integrated on any level (social, economic, religious, cultural, linguistic, political, psychological) after three generations, and in some cases even four (their marriage age being much lower than that of average Europeans). So seven generations seems like a reasonable minimum for people like that. Actually we can't know if all of them will be integrated in 3 or 4 generations from now. At the rate things are evolving, and with the ever increasing tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims since the rise of Islamic terrorism in the last 15 years, it is totally conceivable that ghetto Muslims will not integrate any faster than Gypsies have since the Middle Ages. Then there is no hope for them and it would be better for everyone if they just went back to their country of origin while they still have ties with it (for the Gypsies it's too late).