The Last Days of Europe

Following Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept and Claire Berlinski's Menace in Europe, the latest tome on the subject of Europe's decline I have read is The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent by Walter Laqueur. Laqueur's perspective on Europe's crisis differs from that of Bawer and Berlinski in part from his personal circumstances. Unlike Bawer and Berlinski – American expatriates living in Europe – Laqueur is a native European (born in Germany in 1921) who emigrated to the then British Mandate of Palestine (later the Republic of Israel) and has since become an American citizen, living alternately in the United Kingdom and the United States.

In his book, Laqueur categorically analyzes the crises facing Europe at present, first taking note of how birthrates have declined across the continent over the last century. Laqueur anecdotally recalls that his maternal grandfather raised a family of six children, but three of the six had no children of their own two had two apiece, and one had a single child. This says Laqueur "is the story of the rise and decline of the population of Europe." A decline which started about the mid-to-late 1800s and by the outbreak of World War I had fallen below the reproduction rate – the birthrate needed to maintain a steady population past the current generation. The question raised is this: why did the European birthrate decline and why is it continuing to do so as of the early twenty-first century? Of the many possible reasons bandied about, Laqueur writes:

More important was the fact that more and more women accepted (or felt compelled to accept) working full-time and did not want their careers interrupted by pregnancies and the need to take care of their babies. To give but one example, half of the female scientists in Germany are childless. Most important in all probability was the fact that the institution of the family had greatly declined in value and esteem. Families became outmoded; many wanted to enjoy themselves, not to be tied down by all kinds of obligations and responsibilities. This the apparent paradox that at the very time when Europeans could afford to have more children than at any time in the past they had many fewer children.

The population drop-offs are expected to continue well into the twenty-first century; in fact, it is likely the only European countries with still-growing populations by 2050 will be Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta, and Sweden. This means that by 2050, Europeans will constitute only 4 to 5 percent of the world's population, where as in 1900 Europeans were 25 percent of the world's population.

But one sector of the European population that is growing is immigrants from Islamic countries. However, Laqueur is careful to note that not all Muslim immigrants are the same. In France, for instance, nearly all Muslims are of Moroccan or Algerian ancestry – and a substantial number of the first-generation immigrants already speak French, coming from countries that were once colonies of France. The same holds true in Great Britain, as most of their Muslim immigrants hail from Pakistan and Bangladesh. In Germany, however, most of the Muslim population is of Turkish origin, and few of the immigrants have a working knowledge of German upon their arrival.

Regarding the problem of radical Islam among the Turkish immigrants in Germany, Laqueur explains that the groups responsible for disseminating much of the radical Islamism within the immigrant community are Khalifat, founded by Cemaleddin Kaplan, and an organization called Milli Goerues. According to Laqueur, both organizations are rabidly anti-Semitic and teach a bizarre type of revisionist history claiming that during the twentieth century, Jews were responsible for founding two secular republics in the Middle East: Israel and Turkey. Secular Turkey is labeled "Jewish" because the Islamists allege that the founders of the Turkish republic – Mustafa Kemal and the Young Turks – were actually the descendants of Doenme: Jews who centuries before had converted to Islam and had supposedly hatched a generations-long conspiracy to subvert, modernize, and secularize Turkey.

As if that isn't cause enough for concern, the man long regarded as the political leader of Turkey's Islamic fundamentalists, Necmetin Erbakan, was elected Prime Minister of Turkey in 1996, serving until 1997 when the military forced him to step down. Turkey's current President (Abdullah Gül) and Prime Minister (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) are of the Justice and Development Party, formed from the remnants of Erbakan's now-banned Welfare Party.

Laqueur maintains that there is not only trouble from among Muslim immigrants, but also from Europe's political class, long desirous of forming a pseudo-democratic, bureaucracy-run European super-state (the European Union). As in most European capitals, Transnational Progressivism (to borrow Tom Kratman's term) prevails at Brussels and the potential threat of Islamist immigrants to European stability has long been derided as an irrational fear of populist proles; allegedly angry and bitter about dwindling job opportunities and fearful that immigrants will steal what jobs remain. So rather than dealing with such a real problem, the Eurocrats instead prattle on about the backwardness of America's "unilateralist" foreign policy and such ridiculous non-issues as climate change.

To the extent that Europe's political leaders do concern themselves with domestic matters, they have tried prop up the increasingly expensive and untenable welfare states of their countries. But even so, it is painfully obvious that with declining populations forecast for much of Europe into the foreseeable future, the socialist state welfare model that has predominated throughout Europe will have to undergo substantial changes, if not be done away with entirely.

Laqueur's prognosis for the future of Europe is not good. While Europe may not necessarily devolve into an Islamic caliphate, it may increasingly become a Balkanized backwater, with countries split between populations of Muslims and mostly secular native Europeans. Presently, it would seem that the world is not headed to a post-American future, but instead to a post-European one.

Update:

In the comments, Tom Kratman writes that he did not invent the term Transnational Progressive nor its shortened form, Tranzi. Rather, "Transnational Progressive" is a term popularized by historian John Fonte of the Hudson Institute. "Tranzi" was coined by a contributor to the Samizdata blog named David Carr.