BRUCE BAWER
349
speaker. In Norwegian, the word in question is
fremmedfrykt .
And
whil e this word is often used unfairly to label anyone who criticizes any
aspect of the immigrant communities, there is in fact a real element of
fremmedfrykt
among northern Europeans. The notion that a for–
eigner- especially a dark-skinned foreigner-can become a Norwegian,
a Dane, or a Dutchman, quite simply taxes the imaginations of many
people in these countries. However liberal they may be, their pre-exist–
ing mental categories don't a ll ow for it. For all the racial and ethnic
hatreds that fill the pages of American history, Americans, even bigoted
Americans, tend to be better at this than northern Europeans are; we are
accustomed to the idea that a person from anywhere can become an
American. This is, to be sure, not a virtue on our part, but simply an
idea we are used to. For many northern Europeans, it is not: it just does–
n't come naturally. More than half a century after the fall of Nazi Ger–
many, the notion of ethnic purity still lives, unarticulated, often even
unconscious, in the minds of people who think of themselves as good
Social Democrats. For almost all northern Europeans, national identity
continues to be wrapped up in, and equated with, ethnic background.
For this reason, large-scale immigration-of the right kind-could be
a very positive thing for northern Europe. Certainly there are some
immigrants from Muslim countries, people who have nothing of the
fundamentalist about them, who have proven to be excellent entrepre–
neurs and model individualists in a part of the world where individual–
ism has been traditionally discouraged. (Why? Because it's viewed as a
threat to socia l democracy.) In the Norwegian class I took last year at
the state-run Rosenhof School, I made friends with students from Mus–
lim countries who were easygoing and open-minded . Yet they were the
secularized (or, perhaps, semi-secularized) exceptions among the immi–
grants from their part of the world; that was why they were in a class
made up of people from seventeen different countries in Europe and
Asia (plus me, the sole American), a ll of us with educated backgrounds
and at least a smattering of English, rather than in one of the many sex–
ually segregated, Muslim-only classes down the hall. In those class–
rooms, women sat swathed in fabric, with male relatives at their sides,
providing the family escort without which they were prohibited from
leaving the house. Our class was lively, irreverent, fun; as we learned
Norwegian, we also learned about Norwegian folk ways, and gained
insights into our own and one another's native languages and cultures.
Our discussions brought into focus previously unexamined attitudes
and assumptions that our native cultures had bred into us; and as we
recognized in all this the common foibles and follies of the human
