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Reflections On The Revolution In Europe

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  • Reflections On The Revolution In Europe

    REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN EUROPE
    Mark Mazower

    FT
    May 4 2009 05:43

    Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West
    Christopher Caldwell

    Between 1850 and 1930 more than 50m emigrants left Europe in what was
    easily the most intensive movement of peoples ever recorded - another
    50m left China in the same period. After a pause for the depression
    and the second world war, the outflow continued before being reversed
    from the mid-1950s as a buoyant Europe sucked in workers. Today,
    there are roughly 15m migrants among the 370m inhabitants of the 15
    west European members of the European Union and far more descendants
    of earlier immigrants as well.

    Such figures never speak for themselves and what they signify depends
    on whom you ask. Sober-minded demographers (there are a few) point
    out that Europe's foreign-born population is probably no higher as a
    proportion of the total than it was in the early 20th century while
    the immigrant inflow that took place in the late 1980s and early
    1990s appears to have slowed down.

    But who wants to read sober-minded scholars? As EU population growth
    grinds to a halt, the continent is still over-represented in global
    terms as a destination for migrants, many of whom, unlike in the past,
    come from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. And a lot of them are20
    Muslims. The prospect of demographic apocalypse has always attracted
    Cassandras; about the only subject that is scarier is Islam. Put the
    two together, especially after 9/11, and you have a combustible mix.

    Caldwell is an American journalist, an editor at The Weekly
    Standard and a columnist for this newspaper. He knows the banlieues
    and has talked to more than his fair share of extremists of all
    persuasions. But Reflections on the Revolution in Europe provides
    less an analysis than a call to arms to a continent supposedly already
    capitulating to the new enemy in its midst.

    His argument, baldly put, is that Enoch Powell was more right than
    wrong.

    Europe is in decline from an "adversary culture", and Muslim
    immigration, in particular, poses a mortal threat. He fails, however,
    to deliver the Burkean tour de force implied by his title.

    Throwing off the shackles of political correctness, he plays fast
    and loose with the data and switches between talk of immigrants,
    Muslims and "non-natives" as it serves his argument. Europeans, he
    alleges, are fleeing abroad out of fear of Islam. But the best case
    of "white flight" he can find is of emigrating Jews and even this
    is unpersuasive since the number of those leaving for this reason is
    small and almost certainly exceeded by the reverse flow from Israel
    and elsewhere. Oddly, Caldwell unselfconsciously invokes the Jews as
    indigenous Eur opeans when just two generations ago they were regarded
    much as he regards Muslims.

    Does Islam threaten European traditions of free speech? It is not fear
    of offending Muslim sensibilities that lies behind recent unprecedented
    efforts to criminalise scholarly interpretation. As Caldwell admits,
    Holocaust denial and debates about slavery, the legacy of empire and
    the Armenian genocide have been far more important catalysts for
    European legislators than anything to do with Islam. By contrast,
    the efforts he mentions by anti-racist or Muslim groups to get
    expressions of prejudice prosecuted have generally ended in judicial
    or legislative failure.

    Nietzsche's observation that all philosophy is disguised psychology is
    useful to bear in mind when seeking to understand why commentators
    such as Caldwell talk about Europe in such alarmist tones. They
    would say they have to because Europeans have been cowed into
    submission. Caldwell's fast-breeding, over-sexualised immigrants
    have already established what he calls "beachheads" - the idea that
    the immigrants are the vanguard of a larger invading force - and
    engineered a reverse "colonisation" of historic cities abandoned by
    their native inhabitants. Muslim immigration, apparently nothing less
    than a "project to seize territory", is well on the way to bringing
    Europe within the House of Islam. But this sinister fantasy has less
    to do with reali ty than with neo-conservative anxieties about the
    decline of the west.

    As a concept the idea of the west has always had its expansively
    confident side. Yet for decades it also conveyed the fear of its own
    cultural and racial demise, a fear reflecting Europe's massively
    weakened position in the world after 1945 and uncertainty whether
    the US possessed the self-confidence and political will to step in
    and take over.

    The collapse of the USSR made people wonder what would happen with
    no shared enemy to keep the transatlantic partnership of the west
    intact. Then came 9/11 and the sharp divisions over Iraq and the war
    on terror that split the western alliance in its aftermath. One could
    trace these divisions back to profound disagreements that emerged
    between Europeans and Americans about the nature of international
    institutions, the rule of law and the path to peace in the Middle
    East. Preferring moral and cultural explanations to political ones,
    however, neo-cons attribute European dissension to a softening of
    the continent's moral fibre, to burgeoning anti-Americanism and,
    as the ultimate cause of both, to the growing importance of Islam on
    the continent.

    Of course in many ways, Islam ought to attract them - for at least in
    the stereotypical version presented here, Muslims believe in family,
    in honour, in fighting for one's beliefs. Above all, they are united.

    Caldwell insists that talk of Is lam's diversity is beside the
    point. Behind the critique, one therefore detects a profound
    ambivalence: for all their primitivism, Muslims are, in fact, almost
    what Europeans should aspire to be. The truth, of course, is that
    generalities of this kind are not much use either in understanding
    Islam or in finding answers to complex social problems.

    No question about it: immigration is one of the key issues facing
    contemporary Europe. But if you want a good guide to the debate, this
    is not your book: it is too unhinged, too doggedly provocative, for
    that. Yet the cultural historian of the future may find it valuable
    nonetheless, for it reveals the beleaguered cast of mind commonplace
    among some Americans at the moment when the waning of Washington's
    power became evident and a new epoch in world history opened up.

    Mark Mazower is professor of history at Columbia University. His
    'Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe' (Allen Lane) won the
    LA Times Book Prize for History

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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