Steyn: On the End Of Western Europe

Annie

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Nov 22, 2003
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This is LONG, but interesting. Unlike the regular newspaper columns, he is able to ramble a bit, some of it's quite stream of consciousness, but good:

http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/24/01/its-the-demography/
It’s the demography, stupid

By Mark Steyn

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the western world will survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands— probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the west.

One obstacle to doing that is the fact that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the west are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society—government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity—“Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare. Americans sometimes don’t understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don’t think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health & Human Services.

...

Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it’s not what this thing’s about. Radical Islam is an opportunist infection, like AIDS: it’s not the HIV that kills you, it’s the pneumonia you get when your body’s too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose—as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there’s an excellent chance they can drag things out until western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

That’s what the war’s about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder”—as can be seen throughout much of “the western world” right now. The progressive agenda —lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism—is collectively the real suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism: the great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn’t involve knowing anything about other cultures—the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures.

...

Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along. In The Survival of Culture, I quoted the eminent British barrister Helena Kennedy, QC. Shortly after September 11, Baroness Kennedy argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage “Islamic fundamentalists.” “We as western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves,” she complained. “We don’t look at our own fundamentalisms.”

Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those western liberal fundamentalisms be? “One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I’m not sure that’s true.”

Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you’re nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words, just as the AIDS pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to the gay agenda, so 9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the most extreme aspects of the multicultural agenda.

...

What’s the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birth rate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it’s hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the western world is that they’re running out a lot faster than the oil is. “Replacement” fertility rate—i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller—is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?

Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you’ll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada’s fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That’s to say, Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria’s by 36 percent, Estonia’s by 52 percent. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: in the 2004 election, John Kerry won the sixteen with the lowest birth rates; George W. Bush took twenty-five of the twenty-six states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans—and mostly red-state Americans.

As fertility shrivels, societies get older—and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business—unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don’t think so. If you look at European election results—most recently in Germany—it’s hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they’re unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It’s presently sixty, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that’s somebody else’s problem. The average German worker now puts in 22 percent fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.

...

So the world’s people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less “western.” Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)—or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the west: in the UK, more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.

Can these trends continue for another thirty years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: the grand buildings will still be standing but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.

What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the one hand, there’s something to be said for the notion that America will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than Monsieur Chirac, Herr Schröder, and Co. On the other hand, given Europe’s track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple America. But, unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and, given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they’re flying planes into buildings for they’re likely to wind up with just by waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock ’em over?

The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You don’t notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually there’s a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly, self-deluding slogan—like Bill Clinton’s “It’s about the future of all our children.” We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking Clinton’s tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the west can’t even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no children has no future.

Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German, and Turkish empires would be gone within half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan as an “amiable dunce” (in Clark Clifford’s phrase) assured us the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts’ position was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the USSR itself.

Yet, even by the minimal standards of these wretched precedents, so-called “post-Christian” civilizations—as a prominent EU official described his continent to me—are more prone than traditional societies to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature. Religious cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future, as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining “the great majority” in “the unseen world.” But if secularism’s starting point is that this is all there is, it’s no surprise that, consciously or not, they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than it’s ever had. The idea that progressive Euro-welfarism is the permanent resting place of human development was always foolish; we now know that it’s suicidally so.

To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA’s got pretty much everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop spook is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU collapse is rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way, and that by 2010 we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots, and assassinations on American network news every night. Even if they avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America militarily or economically is laughable...

...
 
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you’ll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada’s fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That’s to say, Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria’s by 36 percent, Estonia’s by 52 percent. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: in the 2004 election, John Kerry won the sixteen with the lowest birth rates; George W. Bush took twenty-five of the twenty-six states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans—and mostly red-state Americans.

One bit of irony is the socialist governments are allowing immigrants to dilute the natural population while compounding the problem by having low birth replacement rates.
 
MtnBiker said:
One bit of irony is the socialist governments are allowing immigrants to dilute the natural population while compounding the problem by having low birth replacement rates.

Exactly, which is why unless they gain a grip on immigration and find a reason to make nookie, they are doomed to becoming Islamic. I wonder if they notice?
 
Well its a big step to make and I'm not prepared to make the argument, however I suspect a decline in family values in the Western European countries as one core problem.
 
MtnBiker said:
Well its a big step to make and I'm not prepared to make the argument, however I suspect a decline in family values in the Western European countries as one core problem.

Another large jump on my part, but I'll risk it, the fall in family values followed the secularisation of 'post-modern' Europe.
 
Kathianne said:
Another large jump on my part, but I'll risk it, the fall in family values followed the secularisation of 'post-modern' Europe.

So if the theory of the article proves true a religous immigrant populas will replace a secularistic Europe. Now that's irony.
 
MtnBiker said:
So if the theory of the article proves true a religous immigrant populas will replace a secularistic Europe. Now that's irony.
Full circle, some ying and yang there! :laugh:
 
MtnBiker said:
Well its a big step to make and I'm not prepared to make the argument, however I suspect a decline in family values in the Western European countries as one core problem.

That's just part of the larger picture, which is the West's failue to defend itself, period. This is a pretty amazing article for "The New Criterion," which hews to a quite neoconnish line... though it does make "Arabs" the bogeyman, when the real story is a little more complex. I believe Steyn is a converted Jew. Still, K has pulled up a very good article worth reading. As I read it, if Steyn had just expanded the point to "non-whites in general" he would have been much closer to the mark.

I once asked Roger Kimball of TNC why the West was unique. He said it was just random. I asked if race had anything to do with it. He said "no." So, there you have it from one TNC writer --- all the success and glory of Christendom was just "random." Hey, dumbass, so why try defending it?
 
But there's no such thing as the white race. And if there is, it's the most despicable race on earth. Your local paranoid jew could tell you this much.
 
MtnBiker said:
Well its a big step to make and I'm not prepared to make the argument, however I suspect a decline in family values in the Western European countries as one core problem.

Steyn was on Hugh Hewitt, interesting exchange. There are related links at site:

http://www.radioblogger.com/#001277
Mark Steyn on the population decline of the West, and the further embarrassment of Pat Robertson

HH: Mark Steyn joins me, columnist to the world. Let me ask you, Mark Steyn. Yesterday, you wrote a piece in the Opinion Journal that the Wall Street Journal picked up. It's the Demography, Stupid. Have you ever had such amount of commentary that quickly on a piece?

MS: Well, it's interesting. It's basically a speech I gave in New York a few weeks ago, I think, late November. And it was a relatively small crowd. There was Daniel Pipes there, and Judge Bork, and a few other people for the New Criterion. And it pops up on the internet, and within a minute and a half, it's gone around the world, and you're getting reaction to it from Australia and Israel, and Italy and Denmark. It's an amazing thing. It's a completely different kind of media time we live in, where you make a passing reference to Denmark, as I did, and I had reaction from a couple of dozen Danes within an hour and a half. You wouldn't get that in a...

HH: Here's my theory. It's candid. It's brutally, bluntly candid about where the West is going, and that people have been hungry for, and are afraid of that at the same time. Your reaction to my analysis?

MS: Yes, I think you're right. You know, I tried, when I started writing about these issues, to be rather dispassionate about it. And in a sense, when you write in a dispassionate way about it, you become evermore detached about it. It's like you're watching something proceeding. It's like watching a sort of truck coming toward you, and it's seeming like a film, as if it's not going to hit you. But what dismays me is the way that...when people criticize that piece. On the left, you're just generally accused of being a racist, which is sort of a banal observation. If I was a gay or a feminist, I would think it would be foolish to assume that you can have a significant portion of your population become Muslim, which is what's happening in Europe, and for that not to have implications to you. I mean, you imagine...if you believe in gay marriage, say, do you think the Massachusetts Supreme Court would support gay marriage if three of five judges were Muslim? And that's really what they're looking at in certain European countries. So it ought to be the left's issue. And then on the right, people say well...people say these are doomsday projections like the environmental wackos make. But it's not. I mean, if you have one million, say, Italian babies born in 2006, there's only going to be one million Italian 20 year olds around in 2026.

HH: Right.

MS: It's not a projection. It's a fact. There's only going to be one million young Italian adults. So if you need two million to support your social welfare system, you're going to have to find them from elsewhere. And these days, there's no incentive for a talented Indian, or Singaporian, or Chilean, to contemplate moving to the European Union, or to Canada, and paying conficatory taxation to support a lot of deadbeat geriatric Europeans.

HH: The Opinion Journal piece's title, It's the Demography, Stupid, it's linked at Hughhewitt.com. I'm sure Radioblogger will link it again tonight, in case you haven't seen it, America. But let me give the four-part summary as I see it, Mark Steyn. The West isn't serious about serious things. The West isn't reproducing. The Islamic world is the beneficiary of both its lack of seriousness, and its lack of reproduction. And along with the general spread of Islam into the void of demographic reproduction comes radical Islam as an opportunistic infection along with general Islam. Fair summary?

MS: Yes, I think that's right. I think...my concern about Islam, when people talk about oh, well, we need a Muslim reformation, is that in a sense, we've had one. If you talk to people who grew up in a relatively relaxed Muslim culture, thirty, forty years ago, and they say now those Muslim cultures, in South Asia, for example, and Indonesia, in Singapore, in Malaysia, the Muslims there are much more, are much closer to Saudi Wahabism than they were thirty or forty years ago. So Islam itself has undergone a transformation. And the most radicalized Muslims of all, in some ways, are the ones in Europe. I make an exception for a lot of this in America, and some people think I shouldn't be making an exception, but I really think Americans still have a tremendous advantage. They do a much better job...the United States does a much better job of assimilating immigrants than most other Western countries, there in part because they've been doing it a lot longer. You know, Sweden and Denmark and Norway and the Netherlands, these are countries that really didn't have significant immigrants until twenty five, thirty years ago. So America still does some things better than other countries.

HH: Let me jump to the end, to the real stinger, and I hope people will read through to the end to get to the quote, permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German and Turkish empires would be gone within a half a decade. And I blame Francis Fukiyama for this, for this general idea that the West will wake up and get off of the mat. It's not necessarily so, is it, Mark Steyn?

MS: No, and I think, actually, where he goes wrong in his theory is in fact, usually you have incredibly swift and dramatic change. That's what happened in the second decade of the 20th Century, where these huge endearing European empires, one by one, were all suddenly gone. Russian empire, Austrian empire, German empire, Turkish empire, boom. All off the map. Similarly, in the late 1980's, you're watching TV one day, and they're talking about some demonstrations in...where is it? Czechoslovakia, or Hungary...it's kind of hard to follow. And within a few weeks, they're chipping away at the Berlin Wall, all these guys are gone. Havel's being sworn in as president. These...I think it's more likely we're going to have big, convulsive changes happening in that kind of sudden way, within the next fifteen or twenty years at the most.

HH: Well, it's a crucial piece. I hope everyone reads it. I want to get a couple of other subjects in with you, Mark Steyn, today. There's an epic figure on a respirator. John Podhoretz on this program yesterday referred to Ariel Sharon as, other than David Ben Gurion, the most significant figure in modern Israeli history. Do you agree with that assessment? And do we have a real grip on sort of the significance of this man's life?

MS: Yes, and I think he is the most consequential figure of our time in Israeli politics. And particularly so, because obviously, he abandoned his party, Likud, to form this new party. In a sense, the party's identity is very much wrapped up in him. They have a kind of modified Westminster system in Israel. So people...his supporters in that parliament are basically sitting for a party that they were never elected on. The acting prime minister is a man who is not formally the leader of that party. These are all kind of potentially problematic things. The new party itself may find it very hard to maintain any kind of identity without Sharon actually in there pitching. And basically, even what's happening in Gaza, where you're now seeing the full exposure of the Palestinian death cult, as they crash through the Egyptian border and kill Egyptian soldiers. These guys...more Palestinians have been killed by Palestinians these days than by Israelis. I mean, he is someone who has very much changed the whole focus of this issue in the Israel/Palestine thing.

HH: Now the last part deals with two religious leaders. Pat Robertson, who today decided it was the will of God that Ariel Sharon have a cerebral hemorrhage, and embarrasses Evangelicals again. And Father Joseph Fessio will be on in the last hour today to talk about Benedict. Has Benedict got an eye on the same problem you were writing about, Mark Steyn, in terms of the central challenge in Europe, do you think?

MS: I think so. I think he has a choice before him. He's going to be the first Pope to preside over a Church whose focus increasingly will be non-European. In other words, the growth area for the Catholic Church is outside Europe. And he's got a tougher job than John Paul had, which John Paul had to point out the defects of Communism. Ratzinger has to point out the defects of very relatively prosperous and superficially attractive Western European secularism, which is much more difficult. As for Pat Robertson, he sounds as nutty as these Imams, who say it's the will of God. I don't subscribe to this equivalence between, you know, Wahabi Imams and Christian fundamentalists. But I'm prepared to make an exception for Pat Robertson.

HH: (laughing)

MS: I think the media only keep him on TV because he basically embarrasses Evangelical Christianity in this country, and that happens to suit them. There's no reason to have him on.

HH: And he owns the station, too. That kind of helps to keep yourself going, despite the ratings. Mark Steyn, always a pleasure, my friend. We'll look forward to talking to you again next week. Steynonline.com, America.

End of interview.
 
*bump* sometimes you've got to wonder...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070106/ap_on_re_eu/germany_falling_population&printer=1

German population continues to decline

By STEPHEN GRAHAM, Associated Press WriterFri Jan 5, 9:07 PM ET

Germany's population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2006 and recorded the biggest drop since the country's reunification in 1990, the government said Friday, days after launching financial incentives designed to stall falling birth rates.

The number of births, meanwhile, was the lowest since World War II.

At the end of 2006, the number of people living in Germany was an estimated 82.3 million, 130,000 below the total at the end of 2005, the Federal Statistics Office said.

Germany's population grew in 2001 and 2002, but has fallen each year since. From 2003-2005 the population dropped by 5,000, 31,000 and 63,000, respectively.

German officials have been reluctant to ease immigration rules to bolster the work force, despite complaints from industry that there are not enough skilled workers in some areas. Demographers and economists say the problem will only grow worse, and that an aging population will put serious strains on pension funding and on the economy for lack of workers...
 
Well its a big step to make and I'm not prepared to make the argument, however I suspect a decline in family values in the Western European countries as one core problem.

The breakdown of the family will lead to the destruction of society, not just Europe but the entire world.
 
The breakdown of the family will lead to the destruction of society, not just Europe but the entire world.

Therein lies the biggest threat to the West. Muslims, folks from Asia, like China, and Vietnam, put a high value on the family. The FACT that we don't is most disturbing, and will be our undoing.
 

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