At a recent lunch with a distinguished group of Qatari leaders of thought, someone asked me the obvious question. What can one make of the cartoon controversy? I told them that it reminded me of a fight between a husband and wife over coffee. The couple was so upset about the kind of coffee they should have in the afternoon that they got into a verbal brawl and that ended in fisticuffs. Of course, the aroma of the coffee could not generate such heat. The coffee was just an excuse. The real reason for tension between the two was much deeper. The cartoons are like the coffee. To understand why they have generated such anger, it is necessary to look much beneath the surface.

For the last twenty-five years, the Nordic countries have championed the cause of the poor and the developing world. They have been at the top of the aid donor league. They have welcomed immigrants with open arms. They have practised social contract at home and advocated a kind of global social contract abroad. In particular, their support for the minorities, the kind who migrate more than others, is well known, be it the Palestinians in the Middle East, the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey, the Tamils in Sri Lanka or the democrats in Burma.

The welfare model of the Nordic and other European countries worked well in the industrial economy. As knowledge economy replaced large segments of the industrial economy, several people lost jobs and more and more are losing by the day. The economic change is also reflected in a subtle but crucial political change. More and more, political parties are serving the interests of the centre. The New Labour and the New Tories of Britain are very similar. In Germany, the Socialists and Christian Democrats have joined forces to create a coalition government. The Netherlands government has always been a coalition for years and the differences between the Labour and Conservatives in the Scandinavian countries are getting narrower.

In such a world of the common political centre space, those on the margins, at the Right as well as on the Left, are left out. They lose economically if their industrial skills are irrelevant in the knowledge economy. They lose their political voice as those in power want to represent the growing middle class and are less and less bothered about the unemployed working class.

Ironically losers in the new economic and political landscape include the original local population as well as the migrants. They tend to fight more with those who are like them than those who are different. Whenever I travel to Europe, every day I experience hostility from taxi drivers and lower hotel staff of migrant origin. They simply cannot tolerate that someone living in the developing world can afford to hire their services when they gave up their homes to improve their economic fortunes in Europe and ended up driving cabs despite engineering or medical education. I have faced such abuse on offering tips that I don’t dare to do it any more. It is much safer to pretend to a migrant taxi driver that I am taking the taxi out of dire need and ask him for a minor concession. It satisfies his ego and ensures my safety.

While the migrants hate people who appear to be visitors doing well from their countries of origin, they attract hate from those who are doing not so well in their host countries. Their failure to integrate with the host society is a cause of concern to those who have been laid off from a factory that relocated to Eastern Europe or China. It is the mutual hatred between those who have failed in Europe’s economic transformation that is reflected in occasional graffiti, newspaper articles and now cartoons.

It’s not just the unemployed workers who use culture as an excuse to hate someone else. Even the capitalists on the right who have similar fears of losing their prospects behave in a very similar way. Exactly at the same time that the cartoon controversy filled political pages of the world media, Laxmi Narain Mittal’s bid to take over Arcelor, a French still company, evoked rage from the European nationalists. As a matter of fact, Mittal’s companies are European with their bases in UK and the Netherlands. His growth can be credited to the free market policies of UK. A takeover by his British company based in the Netherlands of a French company based in Luxembourg should be normal. It is resisted only on the grounds that Mittal is of Indian origin. Culture is a soft weapon used in economic and political game.

Sooner or later, the European societies will have to learn to live with takeover of their companies by Mittal and his alike, and more so by Mittal’s Chinese counterparts. If oil exporting Arab countries learn how better to use their surpluses than merely financing US consumption, they will also join the queue with deep pockets. At the same time, the Europeans will also have to learn to live with the fact that currently 88 million young people inhabit the earth and many of them are going to migrate legally or illegally to their shores. The primary candidates are bound to be those among 10 million in the Middle East and 18 million in Africa due to geographical realities. If Europeans choose to keep themselves busy drawing cartoons, Asians and Arabs will be busy buying their companies and taking over their jobs.

The Europeans should be actually happy with the prospects of migration of youth from Africa and the Middle East. The demographic change and the ageing of Europe is now an old story. By 2025 and more so by 2050, Europe will need young workers. Good inter-cultural relations assimilating the new workers will serve the European economy. If Europe does not find ways to co-exist with cultural differences, it will invite upon itself an economic catastrophe.

At the same time, the Arabs and Asians owe it to themselves that they play by European rules if they want to operate in the European economic space. It is one thing to preserve culture of one's origin. It is another to live in ghettos and make no effort to learn best practices from the host country. If West European countries have succeeded in the last 500 years over those in the Middle East who had a good start 1000 years ago, it is partially because of the efficacy of the institutions they have built. The Asians and Arabs must learn how to use these institutions to their advantage as Mittal is doing. In the case of Danish cartoons, a reference to judiciary under Section 266B and Section 140 of the Danish Penal Code could possibly send the cartoonist to jail for 24 months under the Danish law and prohibit others from following him. It is also necessary to make a distinction between a citizen and the state. In the case of Denmark, the anger against the state was understandable since Denmark's prime minister refused to meet Arab ambassadors in Copenhagen. This reflects Denmark’s national sentiment though it does not justify physical violence against Danish missions and interests. In the case of Norway, the action of a solitary journal could not be used as an excuse to attack Norwegian missions when the state and society of Norway does conduct itself very differently. Unlike Denmark's right wing government, which supports Iraq war abroad and consumerism at home, Norway's Labour and Socialist coalition is committed to peace processes around the world and a disciplined use of oil funds at home. It is necessary for Arabs and Asians to undertake sophisticated analysis while designing response to provocation resulting from deeper problems engineered by the behaviour of their own people who feel left out of progress as much as the locals who also feel left out in the new consumerist world.

Fortunately, there are enlightened leaders both in the West and the Islamic countries who have a constructive vision of the future of the world. There have been enough of dialogues merely to exchange views. It is now more than urgent to examine facts on the ground and beneath the ground and to make efforts to construct a common ground. There is political will but it is not tapped. Strategic Foresight Group is in a unique position to make a difference thanks to its dispassionate approach that has found acceptance by senior Arab, Southeast Asian and European leaders. Watch this space in the next few months.