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The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent

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While the European Union is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding as an economic community, The Last Days of Europe joins a long list of books that warns of Europe's decline, like America Alone by Mark Steyn, Menace in Europe by Claire Berlinski, Londonistan by Melanie Phillips, While Europe Slept by Bruce Bawer and The Force of Reason by the late Oriana Fallaci.

Laqueur's contribution has a resigned and melancholy feel, unlike some of the aforementioned titles. He analyses the current European identity crisis and the rising xenophobia amongst native Europeans with empathy, observing that the average European family today has fewer than 2 children as opposed to five in the 19th century. This decline of the native birthrate is contemporaneous with massive immigration from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The immigrant populations have high birthrates which increase social tensions since the concept of the melting pot is utterly alien to Europe. Immigrant groups have ghettoized themselves and this hostility to the host countries is breeding violence. Nowhere is this more evident than in Brussels, the seat of the EU bureaucracy.

While the threat of radical Islamism increases, Europeans are in full appeasement mode. Following Theo van Gogh's murder in 2004, certain Dutch politicians like Ayaan Hirsi Ali had to go into hiding. In 2005 there were the riots in France and the Danish cartoon episode, when very few public figures had the guts to defend freedom of speech. The next year the elites declined to defend the Pope's observations on reason and religion. And abroad, Europe has been made a fool of by the Iranian ayatollocracy with its nuclear ambitions.

Laqueur lucidly appraises the continent's 20th century history: how its wars, its murderous collectivist ideologies, and post World War II, its welfare statism and depressing multiculti and relativist cults have drained it of self-confidence. They might stimulate bistro dialogue over decaf lattes, but Foucault, Guattari and Deleuze are no match for the impassioned, expansionist faith of the immigrants.

The author's prescription is nothing new: he recommends stricter controls over the abuse of democratic freedoms by radical preachers and the promotion of integration, meaningful work and better education for the alienated groups. There are signs of these and some ground for hope after the latest German, Swedish and French elections, but these solutions will not work without a spiritual revival.

It is clear that Old Europe especially, is in deep trouble. The most disturbing scenario would be a repeat of the 1930s, by for example the embrace of a charismatic pan-European leader in the face of frightening crises, instead of a return to classical liberal values. Part of the problem is, Europe does not have much of a principled Right, except perhaps the libertarian parties of Scandinavia or the Flemish nationalists.

Oriana Fallaci likened the old Italian Right of the Risorgimento to a noble lady that committed suicide - an apt description of the senescent Christian Democrats that have accepted the tenets of welfarism. Thus the welfare state consensus has never been properly challenged except in the UK where Margaret Thatcher positively transformed the country in the 1980s. That is why British society is in a better state today.

For further information on the recent history and the current state of Europe, I recommend Eurabia by Bat Ye-or, The West's Last Chance by Tony Blankly, The West and the Rest by Roger Scruton, Our Culture, What's Left of It by Theodore Dalrymple and The Dragons of Expectation by Robert Conquest.

Walter Laquer has been writing histories of Europe for a long time. He is, in fact, 86 and has written 20 or more books. "The Last Days of Europe" is an assessment of Europe now and through the remainder of the 21st Century.

Essentially Laquer suggests that Europe will become a gigantic museum with Muslims as the ticket takers. Ethnic English, French, Germans, Russians, all Europeans aren't reproducing at a rate sufficient to replenish their stocks while Muslim immigrants are not only outbreeding Europeans, but failing to integrate. The result? A largely Islamicized Europe. He is far from alone in this view. Other authors, notably Mark Steyn (America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It), Melanie Phillips (Londonistan), Bruce Bawer (While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within) and Claire Berlinski (Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too) have written of a changing Europe, each from their own perspctive. Most notable is the late Orianna Fallaci's (The Force of Reason), written as she was dying and filled with fiery passion.

Laquer's view is quite interesting because unlike the authors cited above, he does not reflect first-person views, but rather sticks to the statistics and raw facts, which are frankly depressing.

Europe has failed to integrate Muslim immigrants into its societies. While some Muslims have indeed become a part of their adopted nation, most remain apart. They do not attend school. They do not learn the native language. They do not assimilate. They do hate. They do nurse and nurture discontent. They do sop up, with the all too willing help of social workers and multiculturalists, all the financial benefits they can. And they reproduce, all too often with wives brought from their countries of origin.

Increasingly these Muslim immigrants are being radicalized while their children drift off into gangs or a srange counter-culture that rejects their parent's values but doesn't adopt the values of their host nation.

Europe's economic stagnation, globlization, aging populations and the native's failure to reproduce will, according to Laquer, reduce Europe to a largely Muslim society by 2050.

This is not an optimistic book. Nor is it particularly dystopian as others have been. Rather it is a sober and fully explained assessment by a competent historian who has seen Europe's fall into the abyss of evil in the 1930s and 40s, its recovery and its missteps toward its preseent dangerous position. Laquer does not forsee the survival of Europe as we know it.

Required reading for anyone concerned with political stability in Europe and the world.

Jerry

Some pundits still proclaim that "the twenty-first century will be Europe's" (p 15).

Certainly, Europe did have an almost miraculous recovery after World War II. And uniting their countries under a common currency should be beneficial.

But all along, like a dark cloud gathering on the horizon, there have been indications that things are going seriously wrong in Europe. And chief among the problems is the decline in population. For example, "Italy counts some 57 million inhabitants at present; this is expected to shrink to 37 million at mid-century and to 15 million by 2100" (p 24-5).

The population decline is so vast it hardly seems believable. Tiny, poor Yemen will surpass Russia in population by 2050, if UN statistic projections are to be believed. Currently, Russia experiences more abortions than births. The population decline is further aggravated by a decline in mortality, caused partly by rampant alcoholism.

Two other problems are associated with the decline in population. The first is that "by 2050 one-third of the population of Europe will be sixty-five or older" (p 127). In other words, Europe will be one large daycare center for the elderly. There will be an enormous growth in health expenditures by each government, in social services and welfare benefits.

But where will the money to pay for this come from? From its tiny population? And, moreover, a population that doesn't seem to like work? Already, Germans work less than workers in any other country. The welfare state was sustainable only in a growing economy. How can you have a growing economy with few workers and a huge payout to the elderly? And yet how can you take away welfare benefits to people who need them, and, moreover, have grown to expect them? The French riot at the merest hint of cutbacks.

The second problem is with immigration. The only group in Europe that is reproducing itself is the immigrant population, chiefly Muslim. Today, in Brussels,"as of 2004 more than 55 percent of the children born were of immigrant parents" (p 15). Will Europe morph into a Muslim enclave?

Interesting questions.

This book could not be discussed in the mainstream European media. Because it would act as an eye-opener to all of those who are not already seeing what lies ahead of us: the end of our civilization in its very birthplace, if no reaction or opposite trend appear ( do not hesitate to compare this with the fate of the Roman Empire). And political correctness does not allow that.
Walter Laqueur manages to give a sober, dispassionate and erudite account of the continent's very gloomy future. And with his track-record as a professor and author of numerous books, he cannot be suspected of right-wing sympathies.
The birthrate amongst native Europeans is desperately low and below reproduction rate; it has been low since 1900 but is now reaching pathetic levels. Europe is shrinking, Europe is dying.
Meanwhile, an alien population of Muslims, introduced to Europe from the 1960s without consulting its local population, is growing fast. In its majority, even amongst the second or third generation, it seems to be unable to integrate into Western European society and is even rejecting its values with increasing force. For years, focused on other issues, Europeans did not see how much of a problem these opposing demographic evolutions would cause.
Even now, politicians and the media are focusing on the problems that the aging population is bringing; who will pay for pensions and health care? Nobody seems to realize that at some point, in 20 to 30 years' time, when the baby-boom generation will have rejoined its ancestors, Muslims in Europe will most probably represent 25% if not more of Europe's population, an even bigger proportion of its younger age groups, those that represent the future, and a clear majority in a number of large cities and their surrounding regions.
That would happen even if immigration should stop today. But it is not stopping but accelerating, with all those poor and illiterate people attracted by the magnet of European prosperity, seeing the " hen with the golden eggs".
Muslims in Europe are optimistic. They know all they have to do is to wait, because Europeans are either not realizing what is happening, or refusing to admit it, and therefore are not reacting. Why? Because European civilization lost its vigor on the battlefields of WWI and WWII, lost its self-confidence and pride, does not believe in its own fundamental values enough to defend them, because the process of European integration (that has largely ground to a halt) cannot replace that emptiness.
There might be a radical yet acceptable approach and Laqueur does not speak of it. Europe should seal its borders as much as possible, introduce managed immigration, keep Muslims out, favor migrants from other parts of the world, and above all that, set up natalist policies that reverse the trend. But I repeat: all that is not compatible with the political correctness prevailing today and natalist policies remind Europe of fascism.
But who knows, if we try dreaming a bit, Europe's problems might also contain within themselves the welcome germs of change. Aging will cause the final collapse of the welfare state as we know it, reducing the attractiveness of Europe to fascinated outsiders, and it will no longer be affordable (sadly)to keep people alive beyond a certain age. There will also be less unemployment as this was largely created by the arrival of the baby-boomers on the job market. The renewed job opportunities as well as the capital left behind by these same baby-boomers will encourage their less numerous children to reproduce with more enthusiasm...

Over the last decade many books have been written praising Europe as the model for the 21st century. Two of them I've reviewed on Amazon: Jeremy Rifkin's The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream and T R Reid's The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy. They argued that Europe had established at the end of the 20th century a model of civilization for the rest of the world to emulate, relying not on military power, but on soft and transformational power. I tended to agree. At the time it looked as if the rest of the world was becoming more like Europe, living in the Kantian space of perpetual peace.

What a difference a few years make. In the interlude numerous volumes have been published very loudly sounding the alarms of European decline: notably Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too,Londonistan: Updated With a New Preface,and While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. Walter Lacqueur, in this short volume, is more measured and remorseful, yet alarmist and declinist all the same. This is all the more troubling since in 1992 he published a work expressing great optimism for Europe.

Lacqueur claims the greatest threat to Europe is demographic. If Europeans need over 2.1 children per family to reproduce themselves, the current average of 1.37 will lead to a population shrinkage unprecedented in its history. In Brussels, capital of the European Union, 55 percent of the newborn children are born of immigrant parents.

Declining birthrates and massive immigration creates another problem. There are now large pockets of immigrants in European cities that not only have not integrated into the mainstream, but have chosen to reject European values and culture. The most salient and dangerous of the unassimilated minorities are, of course, the Muslims. Lacqueur points out that second and third generation Muslims are also failing to integrate, and at the same time are alienated from their countries of origin. This is a very troubling situation and being aggravated by local extremists.

Another worrisome consequence of the demographic decline is the unsustainability of the welfare state. Once considered one of Europe's crowning achievements, it now threatens its financial future. By 2001, social expenditures in most countries ranged from 20 to 29 percent of GDP. This level of spending is sustainable if the economy and the population are growing, but that is no longer the case. Currently there are more people over 65 than under 20.

Lacqueur tells us that the project of European Unity is dead. Even though they now have more members, they are growing further apart. Europe, he claims, has been reduced to being a cultural theme park a la Disneyland. It has become a museum of a formerly great civilization that caters to wealthy tourists from America and Asia. There is a kernal of truth here. For many European countries tourism is the largest sector of their economy, growing at a rate of 4 percent annually.

This book may be a bit gloomy. I think it's premature to write off Europe to theme park/museum status. Europe has been on its knees before and managed to make a remarkable recovery. It is currently nowhere near that level of decline or desparation. Inspite of the obstacles enumerated, Europe is still represents the most just and humane model for relations between states. I still think the rest of the world will come around to seeing it also.

Walter Laqueur is no Mark Steyn but who else possibly could be? The latter's America Alone was one of the most energetic and engaging accounts imaginable concerning the decline of the west and it sits atop my list of the best books of 2006. However, The Last Days of Europe, which did not get any of the fanfare Steyn's recent classic did, is an erudite and sober account covering many of the same themes. Laqueur's authority on the subject is undeniable and I found myself shaking my head in affirmation countless times while devouring these pages. What I most admired about him was his refusal to wildly speculate about the future. He admits that we cannot be certain about what will be and that trends are just that, and never a precise predictor of future events.

Will Europe eventually become little more than a museum? I doubt it. The folks who will run it will not be the kind who respect the integrity of old churches and the remnants of a democracy they utterly despise. Thirty years ago many presumed that Europe would be the new dominant power in the world but Laqueur suggests (in Chapters 1 and 4) that, as a result of demographic and economic decline, there is little likelihood of this occurring. Socialism slowly corrupts and destroys those who find themselves unfortunate enough to live under its auspices. By allowing the state to take over their economies, Europe will soon implode and manage to destroy itself. Americans would be wise to learn from their example and roll back the expansion of our own state before the next election brings in a nationalized health care industry...which will break us. Indeed, at the very moment I now type, the growth of our leviathan has brought us to the precipice of a recession. It's time to return the wages of the people to the people, and to memorize Thomas Jefferson's maxim that a government big enough to give you what you want is strong enough to take everything you have away.

The author's main thesis is that certain optimistic predictions about Europe's successful future are unrealistic because they fail to account for some serious mounting problems. These problems can be summarized as the low native birth-rate, excessive Muslim immigration to Europe, increasing opposition to European unity and the increasingly unaffordable welfare state in a Europe with ageing populations.

The author demonstrates his Jewish perspective by seeing only Muslim immigration as a threat to Europe's future. Although he correctly identifies most conflict as being of an ethnic rather than theological nature, he has next to nothing to say about immigration from the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, indeed, he has a positive view of Latin American immigration even though immigration from all of these non-Muslim sources is leading to exactly the same kind of social welfare abuse, unemployment, street violence and ghetto formation as immigration to Europe from the Muslim world.

The author makes many assumptions he expects us to take on trust. He seems to see increasing European integration under the corrupt, globalist and anti-democratic European Union as a strength for Europe, therefore growing opposition to the European Union as a weakness. Yet all those amongst the native people of Europe fighting their civilizational decline oppose the European Union. The author supposes that the native people of Europe, will continue to appease the aggressive, antagonistic newcomers, yet even at the time of writing, clear signs of growing anger amongst the native people of Europe were becoming obvious. This makes the author's predicted outcome of a slow decline and gradual consensual synthesis of the native and foreign questionable. Is Yugoslavia's break-up a more instructive model? The author doesn't consider the possibility. He also assumes that population ageing makes the necessity of immigration unquestionable. How improving technology will effect the economics of caring for an ageing population isn't considered, neither how gradual population decline could lower the cost of living for example by making accommodation cheaper.

Yet another serious failing of the book is that although it contains a bibliography, it contains no references. This makes the few facts and statistics offered unverifiable and therefore worthless.

Overall, I was disappointed. It's a light, easy read but there's plenty of common sense but very little analysis, very little substantiation of arguments, very little in the way of hard information. There's nothing that's not said better by Pat Buchanan, Sam Huntington and a host of writers specializing in Muslim immigration to Europe. Most of all, the book is hopelessly defeatist.

This book is very important not just because it shows the European future, but, it also predicts the future of America, as America has similar problem, even dual, due to threat of illegal immigration plus muslim immigration. American tolerance towards both threats is suicidal.

The middle years of the first decade of the twenty-first century were rather rough for the good old Europe. The economic doldrums coupled with a spate of civil unrest, terrorist attacks, and a lot of social uncertainty created a very dire image that was reflected in several books and publications that were published around that time. Many of these books (such as "While Europe Slept," "Menace in Europe," "America Alone," and of course this one - "The Last Days of Europe") had a very stark and foreboding view of the current situation. These books were in part a reaction to an almost pathological refusal by the European intellectual and political elites to even acknowledge that there is a problem, to say nothing about its nature or the possible solutions. At the time of their publication, these books polarized American (and needless to say European) public opinions. However, as I write this review about five years later, heads of states of Germany, France and the United Kingdom had publicly denounced "multiculturalism" as practiced in their societies, and have all called for a greater integration of immigrants. This is a welcome development and a vindication of the views and arguments that had just a few years earlier been dismissed as belonging to the fringe extremist groups. Unfortunately, many of the trends that had been criticized in the above books (most notably the steep demographical decline of most European countries) have been going on for way too long, and there is not even the remotest theoretical possibility that they could be reversed in the foreseeable future.

The misconception that the critical views of the future of Europe come only from the extremists should have been immediately put to rest once one comes across works by Walter Laqueur. A Holocaust survivor and an eminent historian with decades of impeccable academic credentials, Laqueur embodies what a thoughtful and informative social critic ought to be like. He is methodical in presenting his evidence, and one never gets a sense that he gloats over the misdirected policies that he describes and criticizes. Indeed, he comes across as someone who is deeply rooted in all the great achievements of the European civilization, and writes about Europe's decline with a genuine concern and regret.

Laqueur concentrates most of his analysis on three distinct countries: United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Even though it has become fashionable to lump all "Old Europe" countries together, and even European elites are striving to present themselves as speaking form a unified position, the fact remains that the facts on the ground are sometimes drastically different when one takes a closer look at each big European country individually. The profile of immigrants, and especially Muslim immigrants, varies widely as one moves from one country to another. In the UK majority of the Muslim immigrants are from the Indian subcontinent (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh), in France they are predominantly north-African Arabs, while in Germany they are Turks and Kurds. There are a lot of internal tensions between different immigrant groups, and very often their loyalties are foremost with their ethnic group and not with their religious affiliation. Furthermore, the exact level of religiosity, and the extent that it influences immigrant attitude, is highly debatable. This is especially true of the younger immigrants who had been born and raised in their adoptive countries. Laqueur on occasion draws on the examples from Spain, Italy, Russia and a few other countries, but the "big three" dominate his analysis.

One thing that I wish this book spent more time on is the impact of the European social state on all of the other deleterious trends. Laqueur touches upon this topic a few times, and even offers a few ideas that have been circulated around in recent years, but he doesn't strongly endorse any one of them nor does he delve deeper into this topic. This is unfortunate, because a strong case could be made that, if not being the root-cause of many of the problems that are mentioned in this book, then at the very least the various social and economic incentives that have been at work in Europe since the end of the Second World War have at the very least significantly contributed to them. It would be interesting to read a comprehensive critique of the present-day ills that are plaguing Europe which is based on the analysis of the European social state.

Overall, this is an incredibly insightful and informative book on some of the major social problems that are affecting Europe. Despite the grim title, I am still somewhat optimistic that Europe will be able to pull itself from the brink of a precipice. However, decisive actions need to be taken, and taken soon. Hopefully a book like this one can be instrumental in mobilizing hearts and minds for such painful but necessary actions.

A good source of information about what is going on between Europeans and Muslims in Europe.