Muslim Calvinism – Internal Security and The Lisbon Process In Europe

The European Social Survey Data, and Internal Security in Europe

Muslim Calvinism systematically evaluates the freely available data, contained in international open sources, such as the European Social Survey, on the problems of internal security, and social policy in Europe. The book is the attempt to try to present an interpretation pattern for the complex reality of poverty; social exclusion, religious and societal values, and day to day contact of different population groups in Europe with the law.
The optimistic results of this study are in line with recent very sophisticated and advanced quantitative research results, especially by authors from the neo-liberal school of thinking, who maintain that instead of engaging in a culturalist discourse about the general “disadvantages” of Islam, Europe rather should talk about economic-growth-enhancing migration, property rights, discrimination against minorities on the labor markets, and that by and large, Islam is well compatible with democracy and economic growth (see also Noland M. (2004), Noland M. (2005), Noland M. and Pack H. (2004), Pettersson Th. (2006), Pryor F. (2006), Soysa I. De and Nordas R. (2006), and Tausch A. (2003)). If there is anything as “integration deficits” of the Muslim communities in Europe vis-à-vis the law, defined in this study along indicators of document fraud as well as indicators of lack of trust in the police and in European institutions, these deficits are caused rather by market imperfections and market failures in the European political economy, largely characterized by state intervention, and not by any intrinsic destabilizing or simply “evil” “character traits” of Muslims.
In many ways, the polarizing events in France are a kind of laboratory and testing ground for our theories – high state sector involvement, a mediocre Lisbon performance, and a high, and increasing poverty among the country’s Muslims, which all contribute to rising social tensions, violence and protest in the „banlieus”.

In general, social policy is being influenced in a variety of ways by various forms of criminal behavior in society. Massive tax evasion, for example, will lower the tax base from which social expenditures have to be financed. Massive illegal claims of social benefits would lower the expenditure base, which could be handed out to the real needy in society, and document forgery will not only be of concern to the police, but also to the social policy administrators at state, regional or local government level.
In its design, the European Social Survey (ESS), which is the fourth pillar of data collection by the European Commission – besides Eurostat, Eurobarometer, and the European Foundation for the Study of Living Conditions surveys – does take the most frequent patterns of day-to-day criminality into account, and flatly asks people whether or not they were involved over the last years in activities like
– Falsely claiming government benefits
– Insurance fraud
– Kept change
– Misused/altered card/document
– Paid cash with no receipt

The ESS surveys, based on truly representative, standard questionnaires in the countries of the EU-27, the European Economic Area (EEA), EFTA, the Ukraine and Israel, since the year 2002 also ask people in a two-year rhythm whether or not they trust national and European institutions, such as by the questions on
– trust in the European Parliament and
– trust in the police

Being a standard social scientific questionnaire, people are also asked about a very great number of background variables, such as employment status, religion, income, household size etc.
Apart from presenting data from the European Social Survey, we evaluate and compare our research results to the best of our knowledge with other research materials, derived from cross-national political science and value research. Thus, a variety of results and methods will be presented to our readers – aggregations of our survey results at the national level, cross-national Microsoft Excel comparisons of these survey results with cross-national political science data; SPSS factor analyses of the opinion and civic culture structure of the totality of Muslims and non-Muslims in all of Europe, multiple regressions of the determinants of their trust in the police, in democracy, and in personal happiness, and a re-linking of our “Muslim Calvinist” results with new and as yet unpublished European and global level data about the shadow economy (provided by the European Social Survey), migration, Islam, and national well-being.
At the end of this journey of rigorous quantitative political science, we arrive at the conclusion that Islamophobia is baseless, and that European Muslims; above all, deserve economic freedom, markets and respect.
From the very outset, the authors are well aware of the enormous ethical and moral issues linked to such a type of investigation.

At a time, when in more and more countries of the European Union outright xenophobic or racist practice and slogans seem to be on the increase, the motivation to look into the patterns of social exclusion and internal security are manifold. In the dark days of the world depression and the Second World War, empirical social science was born. Its early development was driven by the desire to confront authoritarian tendencies and authoritarian regimes. More than 80 years after the early path-breaking investigations by researchers like Gabriel Abraham Almond, Harold D. Lasswell and Paul Lazarsfeld and their associates, our investigation asks very simple questions about the great who, what, to whom, when, with what effects, and why from the publicly and freely available pan-European data collection, the ESS, and other openly available international sources. What about poverty of the Muslim and the non-Muslim populations in Europe? Is Islam a threat or in reality even an asset to the European social scene? Do Muslims in reality share the same concerns about jobs, security, employment, democracy, as their non-Muslim European counterparts? What are the effects of poverty on conditions that lead people into conflict with the law? Is there a relationship between the overall aims of European social policy, like the now failed famous “Lisbon targets”  to make Europe by 2010 the world’s leading economy, and the social exclusion of Europe’s Muslim populations? Is it state sector intervention, which improves the social situation of the Muslim populations in Europe, or is it rather state sector patronage, which excludes thousands and thousands of European Muslims from productive employment and ultimately drives them into the shadow economy, and possibly into wider conflicts with the law? And when, and why?

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Arno Tausch, Christian Bischof & Karl Mueller – Muslim Calvinism – Internal Security and the Lisbon Process in Europe – ISBN 978 90 5170 995 7

Comments:

The book “Muslim Calvinism: Internal Security and the Lisbon Process in Europe” provides a new and challenging scientific analysis about Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe and their trust in policy, democracy and personal happiness; a challenging book for all interested readers, especially with the focus of the Muslim and non-Muslim policy in Europe.
Prof. Dr. Dr.h.c.mult. Friedrich Schneider Johannes Kepler, University of Linz Department of Economics

Die Idee, daß Moslems wegen ihres Glaubens einzigartig sind und eine Drohung zu den europäischen Werten und zu den Aspirationen aufwerfen, wird gänzlich entlarvt. Professor Tausch sollte für das Holen der systematischen Analyse beglückwünscht werden, um eine allgemeine Darlegung zu betreffen, die vom grossen Fall, von den jingoist Mitteln, von einer nervösen öffentlichkeit und von den opportunistic Politikern gefahren wird.
Indra de Soysa (PhD), Professor Dept. von der Soziologie-und politische Wissenschaft norwegischen Universität der Wissenschaft und der Technologie (NTNU) N-7491 Trondheim, Norwegen

Das Buch liefert ein faszinierendes Profil der moslemischen Gemeinschaften von Europa, basiert auf einer breiten Reihe Sozialwissenschaft Daten und forscht das Problem ihrer Sozial-, ökonomischen und politischen Integration in Europa nach. Die Autoren sehen den Zustand der moslemischen Integration in Europa als Art Lackmusausgabe für den Erfolg oder den Ausfall der Entwicklung des europäischen Anschlußes und seiner Lissabon Strategie. Indem sie Defizit in der Integration von einer von Minoritäten Europas überprüfen, können sie auf Defizit in der gegenwärtigen Entwicklung des europäischen Projektes zeigen. Breit sprechend, ist das ein Defizit in der Entwicklung von einem Sozialeuropa. Ähnlich einer neuen Studie durch das Bertelsmann Stiftung, argumentiert das Buch, daß es ein Fehler ist, zum von Relationen mit moslemischen Gemeinschaften als nichts zu behandeln aber Polizei und Sicherheit Problem und zu Islamophobia führt, und hebt den Wert der Sozial- und ökonomischen Maße hervor. In übereinstimmung mit der Theorie von Gerechtigkeit durch Rawls, nimmt moslemisches Calvinism durch Tausch und Teilnehmer die Ansicht, daß die Gesellschaft von Europa nicht eine gerechte Gesellschaft sein kann, wenn sie Gerechtigkeit bis eine seiner benachteiligten Minoritäten tun nicht kann.
Gernot Koehhler, Professor emeritus, Sheridan Hochschule, Oakville, Kanada.