Which country has the highest percentage of its Muslim population fighting for the Islamic State as foreign recruits? Algeria? Afghanistan? Indonesia?
Try Finland. No. 2 is Ireland, followed by Belgium, Sweden and Austria.
What do these countries have in common, besides being European? They’re democratic and have high levels of education, health and income. They also have very low levels of economic inequality.
These findings appear in an eyebrow-raising report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, whose recent work also identified another important factor driving radicalization: a lack of assimilation. In other words, the Islamic State draws heavily from groups who do not adopt the culture of the country in which they live and do not truly become a part of it.
These conclusions fly in the face of conventional wisdom: that radicalization flows from economic inequality.
In fact, the report finds strong positive correlations between Islamic State recruitment and high gross domestic product per capita as well as high rankings in the Human Development Index and the Political Rights Index. In short, most Islamic State recruits come from societies replete with comforts and rights.
So what convinces young men in such advanced societies to join the Islamic State? A failure to assimilate, according to the National Bureau report. To measure that, the organization looked at indices for ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization developed by Harvard researchers and calculated the probability that two random individuals in any society would not share the same ethnicity, religion or language.
European countries have low fractionalization levels and lack an assimilationist ethos. “The difference with America is the melting pot,” one of the report’s authors, Efraim Benmelech, said in a phone interview.
The report supports the proposition that a disgruntled population that does not feel it is part of something greater than itself is likely to have members who will fall prey to snake-oil salesmen such as Islamic State recruiters. I and others have written about this link for some time.
Some European leaders also make this point. British Prime Minister David Cameron has said repeatedly that terrorism is not really caused by Western foreign policy, poverty in the Middle East or the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Many who believe those three causes are to blame, however, persist. The French socialist economist Thomas Piketty — whose 2013 bestselling book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” warned about gaping wealth inequality in the West — laid blame for the Islamic State on all three in an article in Le Monde written after the November terrorist attack in Paris. “Only an equitable model for social development will overcome hatred,” he wrote.
The authors of the National Bureau paper, however, write their findings “directly contradict the recent assertions by Thomas Piketty.”
Benmelech told me: “Public housing could lead to segregation, because you are placed in a neighborhood with people just like you.” Inequality, where mobility exists, can spur striving.
He later added in an email: “While the U.S. is infamous for its high degree of income inequality, its ‘melting pot’ culture that promotes assimilation may be one of the best deterrents against radicalizing people to join ISIS — and may explain why the United States ranks a distant 36 in the number of ISIS foreign fighters compared to its Muslim population.”
Considering the anti-assimilation bent of current U.S. immigration policy, however, this is cold comfort. Is a European-like atmosphere in our future? It’s a question worth asking, sooner rather than later.
About the Author
