This author has been fortunate. My twenties were a seminar in the best that open societies can produce. Shanghai’s expat community, Berlin’s creative restlessness, Amsterdam’s quiet cosmopolitanism — each a lesson in what happens when people of genuine ability and curiosity are placed in the same room and told to get on with it. What nobody mentioned, during those years of iftar dinners and Diwali evenings, was that foreign states were quietly funding a different version of integration. One that does not build bridges but aims to exert influence. In this column, we argue that it is time to rethink how we protect the genuine multiculturalism that has enriched our lives for decades.
In the best of worlds, you learn from your friends around the globe things that no classroom teaches. Chinese New Year is not a calendar event but a spiritual recalibration. Diwali brings the particular magic of light as defiance against darkness. You fast, at least for one day, with Muslim colleagues and discover that Islam is not a monolith. Inshallah, spoken by a Pakistani colleague, is a polite signal that something will never happen. The same word from a Turkish counterpart carries the full weight of German Gründlichkeit: it will be done, God willing, and the willing is assumed. The food is rich, the conversations are richer.
And yet this world is a bubble. A privileged, educated, self-selecting bubble. Multiculturalism, in this form, is the product of specific conditions: economic security, institutional trust, and a shared commitment, however imperfect, to the rules of liberal society. Strip those conditions away and something else emerges.
The uncomfortable truth is that every major religion, without exception, has been exploited as a tool of state power. The Catholic Church’s crusades were as much about territory and tribute as theology. Myanmar’s military has weaponised Theravada Buddhism to justify the systematic persecution of the Rohingya, with monks in saffron robes blessing ethnic cleansing. Jewish religious nationalism, in its Kahanist form, has moved from the fringe to the cabinet in Israel, providing theological cover for settlement expansion that most of the world considers illegal. None of this is an argument against faith. Ludwig Feuerbach argued that man created God in his own image, not the reverse. Marx went further: religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world. Douglas Adams, characteristically, cut through the philosophy entirely: “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it?” The fairies, in each case, tend to belong to whoever controls the garden.
What concerns Europe today is not Islam as a faith. It is political Islam as a foreign policy instrument. Turkey’s Diyanet, through its DİTİB arm, operates around 1,000 mosques in Germany and a significant network in the Netherlands. Imams are recruited, trained, paid and rotated by the Turkish state. Their sermons are, at times, written in Ankara. Saudi Arabia has spent decades funding Wahhabist mosques and madrassas across Belgium, France and the United Kingdom. Qatar’s financial reach into British and French Islamic institutions remains substantial.
The effect is not only on the radically inclined. The more insidious damage is to the moderately uncertain: second- and third-generation immigrants, European-born, who feel neither fully at home in the country they grew up in nor in the country their grandparents left. In the Netherlands a record nine new Islamic primary schools are approved to open in 2026, bringing the total to nearly 100. One in three newly opened primary schools in the past three years has been Islamic. The Dutch AIVD and NCTV have flagged Salafist influence in a subset of these institutions. The dynamic mirrors what private schooling does at the other end of the wealth spectrum: remove children from shared civic space, narrow their reference points, and make them susceptible to a particular worldview presented as the only coherent one.
The policy responses across Europe reveal a great deal about what works. Sweden’s historically permissive approach to integration, generous, well-intentioned and insufficiently demanding, has produced pockets of parallel society that Swedish authorities are now, belatedly, dismantling.
Denmark took a different path. Its Ghetto Package identified high-density areas by name and imposed specific obligations. Children in these zones were required to attend Danish-language daycare from the age of one or their parents risked losing benefits. Welfare recipients who refused offers of work or education lost payments. The results speak clearly: Denmark recorded a historic low of only 839 asylum approvals by late 2025, with measurable drops in youth crime and benefit dependency in targeted neighbourhoods. The lesson is not that harshness works. It is that clarity works. Name the problem, set the expectation, enforce the consequence, offer the pathway. Ambiguity, however well-meaning, is the condition in which parallel societies thrive.
The responsibility does not rest only with governments. Those of us who have genuinely benefited from multiculturalism, who can tell the difference between inshallah in Lahore and inshallah in Istanbul, who have sat at tables where the food alone represented four continents, have an obligation to defend the real thing. That means being honest about what threatens it.
The way forward is clear.
- Demand full transparency on all foreign funding of mosques and religious schools, with automatic closure or loss of public status for any institution receiving more than 10 per cent of its budget from abroad.
- Require every publicly funded Islamic school to follow the national curriculum in full, with independent inspections twice yearly and revocation of funding for non-compliance.
- Enrol children in public schools rather than faith-based or income-screened alternatives, and support policies that cap non-Western pupil concentrations to preserve shared civic space.
- Fund and champion street-level youth workers and community liaison teams in high-risk neighbourhoods for early, direct contact that prevents retreat into closed networks.
- Vote for and hold accountable politicians who distinguish clearly between the Muslim colleague who taught you something irreplaceable and the state that funds curricula designed to ensure her children never speak to yours.
The bubble was always the wrong frame. The goal was never a world where a fortunate few could celebrate diversity in a comfortable room. It was a world where that room was large enough for everyone, and where no one was allowed to lock the doors from the outside. That world is still worth building. But you do not build it by pretending the locksmiths are not there.
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