THE DEATH OF EUROPE---Two Books

“It’s the end of the world as we know it.”---R.E.M., 1987

Two recent books, “America Alone” by Mark Steyn and “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” by Christopher Caldwell, detail the story of Europe’s demographic and cultural collapse, a topic of such exquisite political incorrectness that it has received virtually no attention in the American media.

Mark Steyn’s focus is primarily on the demographics, and his book provides something of a primer on that dismal science. The key number to remember is 1.3 births per woman, which demographers call “lowest-low” fertility. This is the level from which no civilization has ever recovered, and there are currently seventeen European nations reproducing at this rate. In theory, the population of such a country halves every 35 years, though in practice it happens faster than that, since young people tend to depart rather than live in an old folks’ home. In thirty or forty years, there will still be places on the map called Sweden and Germany and Spain, but it will be hard to find a Swede or a German or a Spaniard in them.

But of course, when you have a nice modern infrastructure, somebody is going to move into it. Those people are the Muslims who came in as guest workers beginning about fifty years ago and now do all the jobs Europeans won’t do, including the job of reproduction. In the UK last year, the ratio of Muslim babies to babies born of English/Scottish/Irish parents was 10 to 1. The most popular name for a boy baby in London is Muhammad, as it is in a number of other cities in the UK, and in Amsterdam, and in Malmo, Sweden, and in all of Belgium, and in many cities across the continent.

Steyn’s witty book was a best seller, and is now in paperback. It consists primarily of a description of Europe today---the infantilizing welfare state, the empty churches and full mosques, and the disappearance of nationalism and national cultures in the face of the growing power of the EU. The “message” is polemical: though Europe is irretrievable, America can survive the culture war with Islam if it learns the lessons of Europe’s demise.

Caldwell would have no disagreement with Steyn on the current situation in Europe, but his book is different. It is a cultural and political history of Europe since about 1960, when the first wave of third-world immigrants were brought in as “guest workers.” Different nations had vastly different approaches to the central problem of assimilating large numbers of immigrants, and the immigrants themselves differed over time. Gradually, as national sovereignty eroded through the growing power of the EU, what were once local issues became pan-European issues. In other words, the problems facing Germany in 1970 were very different from the problems in France. Today, though those differences still exist, they are not as important. It is not easy to make sense of the miasma of politics across numerous nations over a fifty year period, but Caldwell does an excellent and comprehensible job.

My recommendation: start with Mark Steyn. His writing is always entertaining, accessible, and obsessively documented. If, after reading “America Alone,” you want to delve deeper into how it all came about, give “Reflections” a try.

Copyright2009MichaelKubacki