Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam,
and the West
By Christopher
Caldwell
(Doubleday, 422 pages, $30)
Reviewing Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West in
the New York Times, Christopher Caldwell was skeptical of
the “demographic alarum” Buchanan raised for the United States and
Europe. “Western leaders,” Caldwell wrote, “in fact, are
self-confident as never before — and the central pillar of that
self-confidence is their belief that, to some extent, all cultures
are becoming Western ones.”
In his own book about “immigration, Islam, and the West” seven
years later, Caldwell seems less sure that this is the case. Its
title adapted from Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution
in Europe is instead deeply skeptical of that continent’s
demographic transformation. Caldwell argues that “Western Europe
became a multiethnic society in a fit of absence of mind.” He asks
“whether you can have the same Europe with different people” and
determines “the answer is no.” He even questions whether anything
can be done about it: “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic
culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident and
strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that
changes to suit the latter.”
Caldwell’s book is actually stronger because of his apparent
change of mind. A writer for the Financial Times,
Weekly Standard, and New York Times
Magazine (and former TAS staffer), he is
immigrant-friendly and a cultural optimist by temperament. When he
concludes early in the book that former British Conservative leader
Enoch Powell was factually right about immigration’s consequences
for his country “beyond any shadow of a doubt,” Caldwell clearly
wishes it were otherwise. And even while defending the substance of
Powell’s remarks, Caldwell nevertheless contends “his speech can be
defended against charges of bigotry only by splitting hairs.” He is
left to conclude: “Morally, Powell was not right.”
This tension is what makes a responsible immigration debate so
difficult: the issue lends itself well to demagoguery and ethnic
rabble-rousing, while even judicious and nuanced criticisms of mass
immigration from Third World countries can easily sound like
bigotry to sensitive ears. “To confess misgivings about immigration
was to confess racist inclinations,” Caldwell writes of the elite
consensus view. So most fair-minded people just shut up, leaving
“extremist parties that sow hatred” to tap into popular
concerns.
What are those concerns? After World War II, the major Western
European countries attempted to pad their stagnant labor forces by
opening the door to an unprecedented number of foreign workers,
most of them Muslims. Their families and villages followed until
the Muslim population swelled from tiny numbers in 1950 to as many
as 17 million by 2000. There are now at least 5 million Muslims in
France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Great Britain. By
the middle of this century, the foreign-born population could reach
one-third in most European countries.
Almost every official prediction about this new wave of Muslim
immigrants proved false. Caldwell lays them out in detail:
Immigrants would be few in number. Since they were coming to
fill short-term gaps in the labor force, most would stay in Europe
only temporarily. Some might stay longer. No one assumed they would
ever be eligible for welfare. That they would retain the habits and
cultures of southern villages, clans, market-places and mosques was
a thought too bizarre to entertain.
Yet the bizarre happened. To illustrate that this is immigration
is not solely a product of the European labor shortage, Caldwell
points out that the total number of immigrants living in Germany
more than doubled from 3 million to 7.5 million between 1971 and
2000 while the number of immigrants in the work-force held steady
at 2 million. Two-thirds of French imams are receiving some kind of
welfare. Europe now takes in 1.7 million immigrants a year, more
than the United States, and they are overwhelmingly Muslim.
This was too much too fast for countries whose governments had
no idea how to try to integrate the newcomers into their societies.
The new immigrants didn’t seem especially eager to assimilate and
their guilt-addled hosts didn’t give them much of anything to
assimilate to. The workers improved their living standards compared
to home — so Europe remained a draw but remained poor compared to
the native population, a source of social friction. Moreover, the
values of Western Europe — feminism, egalitarianism, secularism,
and tolerance for homosexuals — are generally not the values of
the Muslim immigrants, to put it mildly.
Negative consequences have included crime, riots, increased
ethnic hostility, and social un-rest. The experiment has also
tested the contradictions of multiculturalism, as tolerance for one
minority group has made life more difficult for others. According
to Caldwell, 62 percent of hate crimes in France are perpetrated
against Jews. Pim Fortuyn, a leading critic of Muslim immigration
in the Netherlands before he was assassinated, was a gay man
motivated at least in part by his desire to preserve his country’s
loose sexual attitudes.
Predictably, none of this is very popular with the native-born.
Caldwell reports that 57 percent of voters in the European Union
oppose further immigration. That figure is even higher in
individual European countries. “If Europe is getting more
immigrants than its voters want,” Caldwell contends, “this is a
good indication its democracy is malfunctioning.”
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is not a
generic anti-immigration polemic, however. Caldwell’s criticisms
are confined to the immigration dimensions of the Samuel
Huntington-style “clash of civilizations” between the historic
peoples of Europe and the Muslim newcomers. In fact, he explicitly
disavows any restrictionist implications of his argument for the
United States. The distinction is far from arbitrary — the United
States is much better at absorbing immigrants than Europe and
Hispanic immigrants are much more like the native-born population
than are West Africans in Paris — but it won’t reassure anyone
familiar with the ominous similarities between how the U.S. and
Europe stumbled into their current immigration policies.
But if Caldwell still takes strong exception to Buchanan’s
cultural pessimism for the United States, he doesn’t sound very
hopeful as he raises the “demographic alarum” for Europe. Few of
the political parties willing to confront Muslim immigration or
require newcomers to assimilate are seriously capable of governing.
Some of them have fascistic roots. Those who can put together
national governing majorities are too often paralyzed by political
correctness. “Europeans,” he writes, “are confused about whether
they are citizens of the world or citizens of their own
nations.”
“Mass immigration into Europe and the consolidation of Islam
there are changing European life permanently,” Caldwell concludes.
A bit later, he writes, “It is far less certain that Islam will
prove assimilable.” He muses uneasily about “the ambiguity of a
Europe rueful about the legacy of immigration and disinclined (or
too weak) to make a fuss about it.” That’s a long way from
possessing the self-confidence that comes with knowing “all
cultures are becoming Western ones.”
In fact, the essence of the problem is that two populations are
living uncomfortably side by side, with one confident in its
identity and the other timid. It is the Westerners who don’t know
who they are, an attitudinal disadvantage as high non-Western
immigration and birth rates change the continent’s demographic
picture. Caldwell, who appears to believe coping half-measures are
destined to fail, doesn’t provide much in the way of workable
solutions. But his well-reported, carefully argued book does help
readers understand the problems facing Old Europe.
