The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent [Paperback]

 

 

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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, 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. He sympathetically analyses the current European identity crisis and the rising xenophobia amongst native Europeans, 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. 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 and 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.

Laqueur, a noted post-war historian, has produced a very helpful and candid work on the future of the European Union as it planned to expand its borders to include nations like Turkey in the early part of the twenty-first century. Early on in this book it becomes plain that Laqueur is not a fan of the notion that Europe can successfully revitalize itself by pushing its political and economic boundaries eastward into Asia in search of greater stability and prosperity. As Laqueur sees it, this great experiment in continentalism will invariably fail because of some structural flaws in its current makeup. The problems amount to the member-states of the European being unable to rein in growing welfare costs while, at the same time, facing the increasing difficulty of integrating the growing tide of Muslim immigration. Handling these two key issues is made doubly difficult by the fact the various economies represented in this organization have developed a growing dependence on Russian oil and natural gas reserves as their GDP(Gross Domestic Product)significantly declines. All the bloom seems to be coming off the roses because, as Laqueur sees it, there was very little to start with. Europe has been in recovery mode for years from the ravages of two world wars, and has only begun to make some headway in recent decades because of heavy borrowing to stimulate economic growth. Much of this money has gone into propping up and bringing along poorer nations like Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal. To become competitive internationally, Brussels has attempted to present the EU as a unified trading bloc to the rest of the world, with guaranteed prices and product. All this is a facade based on the vain hope that a semblance of political unity automatically bespeaks economic success. On closer inspection, which Laqueur tends to do a lot of in this study, modern Europe-the veritable sickman of the West-is anything but cohesive and stable. It is a rather thinly disguised two-tier system consisting of have and have-nots at all levels. You don't have to go far to find the disaffected youth, stagnant industries, and mounting debt threatening to derail the system. This book is worth reading if only to provide another take, albeit a gloomy one, to counter the too-often-rosy outlooks offered in publications like the "Economist".

This is an excellent book.

Walter Laqueur is one of Europe's pre-eminent historians. In this book he offers a sober, and sobering, analysis of post WW2 trends in European history and their implications for Europe's future over the next 20-50 years.

His analysis is based on solid historical evidence. Well worth reading.

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