The European project is undergoing a radical change in its encounter with Islam. It is not by chance that two countries that rejected the European constitution, France and the Netherlands, are the two countries where Islam was most publicly debated. While the negative vote was triggered to a significant degree by national values and sentiments hostile to globalization and neoliberalism, issues related to the Islamic presence in Europe (migrants, Turkish EU candidacy, and terrorism) played an equally decisive role in the shaping of public opinion.

Both French republicanism and Dutch multiculturalism have been challenged by the ways Islam is Europeanized. As Islam becomes European, the proximity engenders confrontation. Muslim migrants are uprooted, distanced from their countries of origin, and acculturated, but their reterritorialization is linked in the public imagination either with a politics of terror (the suicide bombers in the July 2005 attacks against London were discovered to be British citizens) or with claims to religious visibility that conflict with fundamental European understandings of gender and citizenship. It seems that both the republican politics of integration and the multiculturalist politics of difference fall short in face of the nonassimilative strategies of European Islam.

In Holland, the 2004 assassination by a Moroccan immigrant of Theo Van Gogh, a well known public figure who personified the Dutch sense of freedom of speech, crystallized and intensified the ways in which issues around migration and Islam have destabilized national self-understandings in Europe. The incident brought into sharp focus the particular ways the encounter between Muslims and Europeans is unfolding in a pluralistic Dutch society, exposing the limits of a multiculturalist discourse. No longer is a politics of cultural avoidance feasible, nor would it be desirable to draw boundaries between different communities marked by race, ethnicity, or religion. Yet anxiety is growing among both Muslims and Europeans about a perceived breakdown of boundaries, a loss of identity that accompanies the dynamics of this encounter and is leading to the reinforcement of national and religious identities.