Carla Power writes:

When I first went to Mechelen, Belgium, the summer was hot and angry. Leaders everywhere in 2018 seemed to be building ever-higher walls and declaring new definitions of us and them. In the United States, the Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. In Israel, the Knesset passed a law rendering the right to self-determination in the State of Israel a privilege “unique to the Jewish people.” In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s far-right government criminalized anyone who assisted asylum-seeking migrants.

In such a season, Mechelen felt like a refuge. Its cobbled streets, gabled houses, and cathedral tower recalled a chocolate-box version of Old Europe, that mythical place that the far-right claims it must defend. Yet the word that kept coming to mind on my visits there was cosmopolitan. Mechelen reminded me of something I had once read by the British Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. “Cosmopolitanism is an expansive act of the moral imagination,” he wrote. “It sees human beings as shaping their lives within nesting memberships: a family, a neighborhood, a plurality of overlapping identity groups, spiraling out to encompass all humanity. It asks us to be many things, because we are many things.”

Historically, Mechelen savagely rejected such a vision. During World War II, the Nazis used the city’s barracks to transport Belgian Jews and Roma to Auschwitz. At the turn of the 21st century, nearly a third of Mechelaars supported Belgium’s extreme-right party. That started to change when, in 2001, the town elected a new mayor, someone determined to lead Mechelen away from extremist intolerance. Bart Somers’s strategy, which so far has been a success, was to try to make everyone in the city feel that they belonged, a lesson for all countries now dealing with extremism. Cultivating a sense of belonging robs the extremists of a major grievance: social exclusion.

The Mechelen train tracks sit on what was once the richest seam for Islamic State recruits in the Western world. Belgium had Europe’s highest number of foreign fighters per capita in Syria, thanks in part to groups such as Sharia4Belgium, whose volunteers would travel along the Brussels-Antwerp train line to find fresh recruits. Brussels had some 200 residents leave for Syria. Antwerp lost 100 young people. And in Vilvoorde, a town of only 42,000, 29 residents departed for Syria. Nearly every Vilvoorde high school lost students to the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]