Can it happen in Britain too?

SCHADENFREUDE is a German word for gloating at your foe’s misfortune. As a rule, the English only ever feel it when misfortune befalls the French.

General strikes, lethal heat waves, trials of Nazi collaborators -- all these are legitimate grounds for an Englishman to gloat, because none is likely to happen here. However, on returning to Britain last week after months abroad, I have been amazed to encounter schadenfreude on the subject of the recent riots in France. To hear some people talk, you’d think it could never happen here. The only problem is that it has happened here. Four years ago, three northern towns saw full-scale riots involving youths from immigrant communities.

Tensions between white and nonwhite Britons -- the latter now account for about one in every eight residents -- remain potentially explosive. As if to prove the point, last week saw the opening of the trial of the two men accused of murdering Anthony Walker, a black student who died when an ax was smashed into his head. The prosecution contends that he was attacked “for no other reason than the color” of his skin.

Just how widespread is racially motivated violence in Britain? According to the Crown Prosecution Service, the number of “race hate” crimes in England and Wales has risen sharply this year -- by as much as 29%.

Violence is not the only problem. As in France, there is some evidence that Britain’s long-established nonwhite communities are subject to informal residential segregation, to discrimination in the labor market and to police harassment.

So how could anyone feel complacent about race relations in Britain? All the ingredients for trouble seem to be in place. Yet all is not quite what it seems. Some intriguing new research points in precisely the opposite direction, indicating that racial integration in Britain may in fact be -- at least by continental European standards -- a success story.

One study indicates that as immigrant communities grow -- which they do mainly through reproduction, not immigration -- they disperse into new neighborhoods rather than remain stuck in segregated enclaves. Another shows that children of Indian and Caribbean origin are more likely to go into the professions or management than their white contemporaries.

But before Tony Blair cracks open the scotch to drink a toast to his truly United Kingdom, he should ponder what those studies may imply.

It would be nice, of course, if residential mingling and social mobility caused racial tensions to disappear. But successful racial integration can in fact have precisely the opposite effect, paradoxical though that may seem.

A century ago, hundreds of thousands of Jews migrated westward from Russian-occupied Poland and Ukraine to escape from discrimination and periodic pogroms. Many settled in Western Europe. There they thrived, quickly leaving behind the slums where they had first settled. By the early 20th century, the sons and grandsons of immigrants were prosperous businessmen, professionals and academics.

Another indicator of integration: More and more Jews married non-Jews. So total was the assimilation of German Jewry that religious leaders feared their community was simply going to dissolve. Yet within a decade, dissolution had given way to the Final Solution, as first Germany and then all of continental Europe was gripped by an extraordinary anti-Semitic backlash. The Holocaust was, of course, a unique historical crime. Yet its underlying cause -- a violent reaction against the apparently successful integration of an ethnic minority -- was far from unique.

This is not to predict Nazism in Britain. But it is to point to the dangers of a comparable kind of backlash against integration. Because for every success story like the academically ambitious Anthony Walker, there are two or more white losers.

Ill-educated, unskilled and probably unemployed, Britain’s white losers ought to blame themselves (or possibly their elected leaders and negligent parents) for their plight. But it is much more convenient for them to blame the hardworking offspring of immigrants, whose achievements contrast with their own. Their resentments are especially likely to be inflamed by the sight of a nonwhite man with a white woman, because sexual jealousy often plays a malign role in crises of integration.

This not only offers an insight into the character of “race hate” crimes. The fact that a minority of police officers share some of the offenders’ prejudices also helps to explain why police harassment is the bane of nonwhite life throughout urban Europe.

France’s problems may be the result of a failure of social integration. But Britain may yet find that success, too, can bring its own unlooked-for trouble.