America, Alone?

Today is a day I have been looking forward to for some time. It is the day that Mark Steyn's new book, America Alone: the End of the World As We Know It (Amazon link here), becomes available in bookstores. I have not read it yet (I will pick up my copy today), but press accounts and Mr. Steyn's own interviews indicate that the book is an apocalyptic foretelling of what is about to happen to Western Europe, and thus potentially to all of Western society.

Mr. Steyn believes that Western Europe has already signed its own civilizational suicide note. The welfare state, economic decline (itself intimately related to the welfare state), and the civilizational self-loathing cultivated by modern multiculturalism have made Europeans unwilling to reproduce. But empty spaces tend to fill up, particularly when they come with such generous cash benefits, and so Europe will be populated, only not by Europeans but by non-Europeans from the collapsing civilizations around it. And these immigrants, in his view, will be mostly Muslim, and they will bring Muslim civilization with them. Europe, within a few decades, will be Islamic territory.

Mr. Steyn has been singing this calamitous tune for several years – since at least shortly after September 11. So is he Cassandra or are the enthusiasts of the ongoing European dream-building project (fun for kids, too!) Pollyannas? His predictions seem so catastrophic, and yet the observations he makes about life in modern Europe seem so strikingly informative. He claims, for instance, that appeals by politicians to do things “for the children” (which Mrs. Clinton has picked up so enthusiastically from her husband’s greatest-hits catalogue) are much rarer in Europe then in the U.S., because children do not interest Europeans. (Elisabeth Rosenthal has a hauntingly vivid portrayal in The International Herald Tribune of what life in Genoa, Italy without children already looks like.) But so much of this conversation is crippled by the lack of available data, and of the natural tendency of the media to overplay trouble when it occurs. Mr. Steyn, among very many others, cites trends in Europe in which Muslim youths apparently are a much larger proportion of new births than they are of the overall population, which in combination with rapid levels of immigration will mean Muslim majorities far sooner than people think, and yet many societies are reluctant to even keep this kind of data. And yet some others (go here for a terrific example) claim that if one actually looks at the limited data and exist in that historical precedent, the European-caliphate prediction is nonsense.

This matters because if the pessimists are right, it does not follow that Europe will go quietly into the night. Rather, Europeans may believe the pessimistic forecast and alter their voting patterns accordingly. It is equally possible that “native Europeans” (to alter a phrase from the American lexicon of political correctness) maybe begin to vote for harshly anti-immigrant parties, which in Europe are often closely mixed with classic fascist strains of thought. Sometimes – France or Austria– this linkage is obvious, and sometimes, as in Denmark, it does not appear to exist. There has been a harsh taboo against nationalist politics in Europe since the end of the war, for obvious historical reasons, but that taboo has been breaking down in the last 15 years. Since the reaction of EU defeats has only made the anger worse by, for example, sanctioning the people of Austria for voting several years ago for the nationalist Freedom Party (led then by the Nazi sympathizer Jörg Haider), one can easily imagine Europe becoming far more nationalistic in the very near future, even if the demographic scare stories are overblown. Fear of them, combined with anger at EU indifference and even hostility to cultural preservation, may make things worse, long before they get better. As I wrote a year ago in the post linked above, “more likely is that continuing immigration will steadily erode the cohesiveness of European societies and the moderation of their politics.” Whether it takes the peaceful form of the Danish and Dutch assertion of their own cultural primacy to the newcomers among them (Holland now makes all immigrants watch a videotape before arrival in which they see, among other things, men kissing and topless women on the beach), or whether it takes a more dangerous direction of the Jean-Marie Le Pen type is a very open question.

And one of Europe’s biggest problems, which I’ve never seen anyone comment on, is that in some of these countries single immigrant groups dominate the overall immigrant profile. Very many of the immigrants in Holland are Moroccan, very many of the immigrants in Germany are Turkish, very many of the immigrants in France are from North and West Africa. This is in stark contrast to New York or Los Angeles (and in fairness, to London) where the variety is much greater. This means that it is harder for any particular group to feel either uniquely discriminated against or uniquely empowered by their numbers. It is well known in the economic literature on ethnic conflict that societies with very small minorities (think China) have relatively little ethnic conflict (and in China where it exists, it is mostly a function of concentration of groups, as in the Uighur west or in Tibet). But it is also generally true that societies with many ethnic groups, in other words an extraordinarily high level of diversity, also tend to have less conflict. It is those societies in the middle, where a small number of groups makes up a large minority of people, that conflict tends to be the greatest. Economic freedom, which makes it easier for the minority and the majority to be bound together cooperatively, alleviates this problem, but many European societies are noticeably short of economic freedom at this point.

And so Mr. Steyn is probably excessively pessimistic when he argues that Europe will collapse in a heap of sharia, but is probably right that bitter times lie ahead. If he does so (I don’t know yet), he is wrong to treat Europe as an undifferentiated mass, because some societies – Denmark, Holland, perhaps even Germany – have recognized the problem earlier while others – Belgium, France, and Spain – have not. But given his genius with the language (he is the single wittiest political writer on the scene today) and the seriousness of the issues he raises, anyone who cares about the West would be well-advised to read the book.