Douglas Murray's new polemic, 'The Strange Death of
Europe,' ably explains the consequences of Europe's immigration challenges, but
like most other books in the Euro-decline genre, it's short on solutions.
According to
the European Commission’s official compendium of
migration statistics, as of January 1, 2016, more than 35 million
residents of the two-dozen-plus countries constituting the European Union were
born outside of the EU. These foreign-born residents composed more
than 8 percent of the populations of Germany, Britain, Spain, France, and the
Netherlands, and nearly 12 percent of the populations of Northern European
countries like Sweden, Latvia, and Estonia.
As Douglas
Murray demonstrates in his startling, well-argued polemic, The Strange Death of Europe:
Immigration, Identity, Islam, those numbers continue to swell.
The explosion of humanitarian crises in the Levant and Central Asia, along with
the already disproportionate migration to the continent from Islamic countries,
threatens to disfigure European states and the Western values to which they’re
ostensibly devoted.
A Suicidal Continent
Murray begins on a bold enough note: “Europe is committing
suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide. Whether the
European people choose to go along with this is, naturally, another
matter.” Well, then. To clear the underbrush for this trenchant thesis,
Murray takes a hatchet to the flawed justifications Europeans have posited for
indulging immigration, such as goosing the economic engine, enhancing cultural
diversity, and revitalizing an aging population.
In fact, he argues, “the economic benefits of immigration accrue
almost solely to the migrant,” the problems presented by incomplete integration
dwarf the benefits of diversity, and, far from importing young people, European
governments should first “work out whether there are policies that could
encourage more procreation among their existing populations.”
To be sure, Murray acknowledges that Europe has throughout its
history presented “a grand and uncommon receptiveness to foreign ideas and
influence.” But that “receptivity was prodigious; it was not, however,
boundless.”
Uncontent merely to observe from a distance, Murray surveys
refugees up close and personal in way-stations like the Italian islet of
Lampedusa and the Greek isle of Lesbos, where he encounters harried, bewildered
souls, most of whom are working-age men, eager to risk life and limb at sea for
the opportunity, however unlikely, to upgrade the depressing economic station
they experienced in their native countries, be they Syria, Afghanistan,
Eritrea, or North Africa. Amidst bureaucratic haggling, many of these migrants
are simply stalled on these gateway islands, whose resources their swelling
numbers quickly overwhelm.
Murray paints a highly sympathetic portrait of the despondent,
hopeful itinerants he interviews, who include Afghans tortured by the Taliban
and frightfully impoverished teenagers from the Horn of Africa. But sympathy is
not a policy, and Murray insists upon an unsentimental, objective analysis of immigration
policy despite the “tyranny of guilt” that so often infects otherwise
clear-eyed European officials.
Crisis of Confidence
It’s not just the massive population influx that’s threatening
Europe’s integrity but also a continent-wide crisis of confidence. Indeed,
Murray believes, “even the mass movement of millions of people into Europe
would not sound such a final note for the continent were it not for the fact
that…Europe lost faith in its beliefs, traditions, and legitimacy.” As elements
of Sharia crept into the legal framework of various European countries, a trend
implicitly recognized even by the archbishop of Canterbury, “it suddenly seemed
as though some of the absolute bases of Western civilization were being offered
up for negotiation.”
The physical toll of European Islamization has also become all too
evident in recent years. It goes without saying that the overwhelming majority
of continental Muslims are peaceful, but it only takes a small number of
radical Islamists—some homegrown, some immigrants—to inflict unspeakable
carnage on civilians in Paris, Nice, Barcelona, Cologne, Manchester, and
Brussels.
How, then, can European society overcome what the Germans
call geschichtsmude, or that peculiar mix of exhaustion, fatigue,
and ennui afflicting Western civilization? Can a continent that has survived
centuries of religious and nationalist war, including two calamities in the
first half of the twentieth century, Nazism, Communism, and everything in
between, truly be incapable of mounting a defense to the latest challenge?
One prominent response has, of course, been the rise of
immigrant-resistant nationalist parties across Western and Central Europe. Yet
these factions, rife as many are with hostility to traditional Western liberal
values like free trade, individual liberties, and human rights, seek merely to
replace one illness with another. In any event, their tide receded across
multiple elections this past summer.
Another possible solution, as Murray recounts, lies in the solemn
recognition by European governments that they must fundamentally rework the
equation. German Chancellor Angela Merkel earlier this year appeared to
acknowledge that her unbridled optimism over the intake and integration of
hundreds of thousands of migrants was too much. Last year, she notably
proclaimed that her famous catchphrase for addressing immigration
challenges—“We can do it!”—was “a simple slogan, almost an empty formula.”
But only if leaders like Merkel manage to devise an authentic,
Aristotelian balance between justice and mercy, in Murray’s formulation, can
the crisis be truly resolved. Measures ranging from temporary asylum to mass
deportation offer promise but suffer from their own attendant problems. Thus,
ultimately, Murray reluctantly concludes that there are “no decent answers to
the future.”
A Slippery World
The Strange Death of Europe is somewhat poorly organized,
and much of it, perhaps by necessity, retreads well-worn ground.
Murray’s
book shares many of the characteristics of other books of its Euro-decline
genre, such as Bruce Bawer’s 2006 controversial masterpiece While
Europe Slept, Mark Steyn’s demographic polemic of the same year America
Alone, or Jamie Kirchick’s
excellent The End of Europe from earlier this year:
it’s dark and foreboding, not especially optimistic, and long on meticulous
description but short on plausible prescription.
But these books must nevertheless be read and understood as widely
as possible if Western civilization is to maintain its relevance, let alone its
purchase in an increasingly slippery world.
Michael M.
Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and an adjunct fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute. Reach him at michaelmrosen@yahoo.com.
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