The Green Room Podcast: who are Europe's 'Civilisationists'?

Thirty years ago, protests, riots and murders followed the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Three decades later, we recognise the Satanic Verses controversy as the opening act in Europe’s crisis of immigration, Islam, and identity politics. Daniel Pipes, my guest in ‘The Green Room‘ this week, is an historian, the president of the Middle East Forum, and an analyst of Islam in Europe. We talk about how Europe got to where it is, what’s going on now among the new nationalist parties in Europe, and what might happen next.

Pipes calls Europe’s new nationalist parties ‘Civilisationists’. These parties come from various backgrounds, and not all of them are on the right. Many of them have backgrounds chequered by Europe’s violent twentieth century. Their common denominator, Pipes argues, is their shared determination to preserve Europe’s historic culture in a time of mass immigration and cultural fragmentation. Pipes is candid about the shortcomings of figures like Viktor Orban, the illiberal Hungarian democrat who was received in the White House in mid-May.