If we want to preserve the village green, we must acknowledge that strong communities have very little to do with the nature and origin of their membership.

But the nature and origin of a people has everything to do with what they understand “strong communities” even to be, no?

If your point is simply that we should not be racist, then sure.

But if you mean to say that the formation and sustenance of (ethnically diverse) communities does not require cultural (or even religious) change in one or more parties that needs to occur over time and with much difficulty, then I think you underestimate what is necessary to sustain a society.

First: the case of Islam is a complicated one, because of the specific history of Islam as a conquering force, almost reaching Vienna, and having ruled Spain for a long time. There are going to be specific fears about Islam’s presence in Europe, particularly when it superficially appears that the most energetic contemporary form of Islam is a triumphalist political Islamism. I suspect that at least some European fears of Islam are not based upon nationalism, but upon much older and deeper fears of being conquered. These might be complicating factors which make it harder for you to make your case.

Second: Instead of looking at Islam in Europe, a lot of your points could take the Mexican and Hispanic presence in the American Southwest as cases in point. In New Mexico, Arizona, and all the way to southern Colorado, there are or were Hispanic (not Mexican) villages with a real local culture that continued to exist after the USA took the area away from Mexico, and even after Anglos began to move in. These villages sometimes cohabited, easily or uneasily, with various Native American groups, the Pueblo tribes and the Navajo, and with Anglo newcomers, at least until the WalMartization of the whole USA “transformed” things. But this area, with its cultural differences could provide an interesting test case.

Third: In contrast, in Los Angeles, white Euro-Americans of a certain generation often lament the influx of recent Mexican and Central American immigrants, an influx made visible in neighborhoods where signs are now largely in Spanish. Some claim that the absorption of the area by the USA was a temporary blip, and the area’s geographical relationship to Mexico has reasserted itself in the past thirty or so years. But a hundred years of living in a place gives people a sense of its being theirs, almost as much as does living in a place for a thousand years. For that matter, the whole question/tragedy of Palestine and Israel is one based upon who has the real claim to a piece of land based upon history. The dispossession of various tribes across North America echo this same question and tragedy.

Fourth: from the above, I don’t think that nationalism is the only culprit in xenophobia. Like it or not, people are often more comfortable with those who are similar. And like it or not, history gets written by winners (though I wince at that formulation). There are instances of different groups managing to live with each other, with each group tied to the land; but as I’ve tried to show above there are lots of complicating factors as well. Nationalism is one factor, but it’s not the only one.

Fifth: It strikes me that the Balkans and parts of the Austro Hungarian empire might make interesting test cases for your attempt to formulate how there might be localism coexisting with religious, ethnic, and cultural diversity. And these cases might include Islam. What did make the ethnic and religious warring take place in the 1990s? Was it only strong man Tito, or the Ottoman empire, that made it work before?

Sorry for the length. But I admire what you are trying to do, since the hobbit world no longer exists, if it ever did, but certain values are real and worth something, and oversimplifying their application and character and presence helps no one.

British.

You write: “I should never expect a Punjabi family in Somerset to “become” English; nor, for that matter, should I expect their English neighbours to think of them as “really” English when they probably do not.”

But you can expect them to become Christian and therefore your brother.

In so far as the Greeks remained Christian, they remained Greek; those that left dhimmmitude for Islam became, well, Turks.

It is rather the point of banning muslim minarets and not, say, muslim restaurants. The former is a metaphysical assault, the latter is a (cosmopolitan) physical accommodation.

And “Alienation and Diversity” http://apoxonbothyourhouses.blogspot.com/2009/11/alienation-and-diversity.html

They are too long to post the whole thing, but I think they address many of the concerns discussed in this post.

Yes. About the only sentence I’d agree with..