Troubles in the Continent

After Pallavi Aiyar moved from Beijing to Brussels in 2009 as a foreign correspondent to cover Europe for an Indian publication, she soon discovered that her move, in sheer journalese, was one from an “energetic story of rise to a tired one of genteel decline”.

In Punjabi Parmesan , her new book, on a continent in crisis, Aiyar recalls the travails of life in the Belgian capital. It takes her several weeks to get a phone connection compared to a day in Beijing, and nine weeks to get a residence card compared to five days in Beijing. It takes her four months to buy a car as the sales staff is always on vacation. Cost of living is considerably higher than in Beijing. Also, stores shut early; cyber cafes shut at eight to “protect public tranquillity”. Aiyar wryly observes, “I had not left communist China for capitalist Europe but capitalist China for a very socialist Europe.”

Deftly blending reportage, analysis and memoir, Punjabi Parmesan is an account of her three years as a journalist in Europe. Aiyar looks at the continent’s many crises through the “prism of an Indian who has also lived and worked for several years in China”; it is, a telling of how “First World crisis looks like from an emerging country point of view”. The result is a highly engaging book by a first-rate, energetic and perceptive journalist.

Aiyar finds a continent in the throes of crises on arrival. On the one hand is a “crisis of demographics” — the continent’s ageing workforce is declining by a million every year for the next five decades — which is leading to a “crisis of competitiveness” against large challengers like China and India. There is also a burgeoning “crisis of social contract” as people and governments try to look for alternatives to generous welfare states that are under severe strain. More importantly, possibly, is the challenge of accommodating the burgeoning number of immigrants who are often “ethnically, culturally and religiously” at odds with the natives.

And then there’s the urgent crisis involving the euro, a currency shared by 17 members of the European Union, which draws attention to the political and economic challenges of a union trying to “yoke together countries with sharply divergent cultures, mentalities and levels of economic development”.

Aiyar deftly juggles the shared histories of India, China and Europe to tell her stories. As an Indian correspondent, she finds Europe’s crisis a “rather strange creature”: a “nice-smelling, well-dressed, bucolic kind of crisis”.

How does Europe, for example, handle the issue of migration? Muslim immigrants have settled in large parts of the continent. Some four million Muslims account for 4 per cent of the region’s total population and in cities like Brussels, Amsterdam and Marseilles they account for over a quarter of the population.

But immigration is not popular in Europe — polls showed that natives believed it was a problem and supported tougher restrictions. Anti-immigration political parties had sprung up. There are other problems: around 85 per cent of the world’s unskilled migrants head for Europe, while only 5 per cent went to US. Highly qualified foreign workers made up only 1.7 per cent of the employed population. Clearly, as Aiyar writes, Europe needs to “make itself more attractive to skilled foreigners.”

It will not be easy. Europe has a vexed history of multiculturalism. Though overt religiosity has been rooted out, she believes, the continent is not as secular as it likes to claim and struggles to “balance freedom of speech with freedom of belief”. She writes that Europe “fails as a paradigm of tolerance”, and hastens to add that “multiculturalism remains a fraught progression than a happy accomplishment”. Isn’t that true for most nation states?

She shines as a reporter in her exploration of the Indian diaspora. She travels to Antwerp where some 400 families of Gujarati businessmen control 70 per cent of the diamond trade — the trade accounts for 10 per cent of Belgium’s exports — and explores how the control of the trade had moved from the orthodox Hasidic Jews to the Indian Gujaratis.

Not surprisingly, cheap labour, large, networked families and working longer hours than the competition had contributed to the success of the Indians. They lived in ghettos, “homesourced” work — polishing rough diamonds — to India, ran a cricket club that barred non-Indians and built the largest Jain temple outside of India. It’s an absorbing story of how a cloistered community can fully reap the benefits of globalisation.

She also travels to Italy, home to the second largest Indian diaspora in Europe. The vast majority of some 2,00,000 Indian workers happen to be Punjabi Sikh immigrants who work on vegetable and diary farms in the remote countryside whom Italians see, in the words of an Indian diplomat, as “reliable, enterprising and quite docile”.

A Europe in crisis is a grim prospect, Aiyar writes, a recipe for xenophobia, protectionism, reassertion of native identities, unemployment, economic stagnation and rise of extreme right wing. A beleaguered Europe is also bad news for growth everywhere. Even after the euro crisis, half of the world’s trade in goods and services involves Europe. As with most nation states, the European Union is an ongoing project, it is “a work in progress rather than an irreversible finality”. Also, it’s not too late for Indians to get more invested in the idea of Europe. Aiyar’s fine book should be a good starting point.

(The writer is India Editor BBC news site)

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