How to Deradicalize Your Town
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
