It's the Demography, Stupid
The real reason the West is in danger of
extinction.
BY MARK STEYN
The New Criterion
Wednesday,
January 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007760Most
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 not
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 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
and Human Services.
The
design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires
a
religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian
hyperrationalism
is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than
Catholicism or
Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure
its future, the
European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the
strategy of the
Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could
increase their
numbers only by conversion. The problem is that
secondary-impulse societies
mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at
any rate, virtues--and that's
why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a
primal force like Islam.
Speaking of which, if we are at
war--and half the American people and
significantly higher percentages in
Britain, Canada and Europe don't accept
that proposition--then what exactly
is the war about?
We know it's not really a "war on
terror." Nor is it, at heart, a war
against Islam, or even "radical Islam."
The Muslim faith, whatever its
merits for the believers, is a problematic
business for the rest of us.
There are many trouble spots around the world,
but as a general rule, it's
easy to make an educated guess at one of the
participants: Muslims vs. Jews
in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir,
Muslims vs. Christians in
Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims
vs. Russians in the
Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like
the
environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.
Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this
thing's about. Radical
Islam is an opportunistic 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. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue
was
subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that
all
cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced
Western
society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched
native
dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing
"Rudolph the
Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your holistic masseuse uses
techniques developed
from Native American spirituality, but not that you or
anyone you care about
should have to live in an African or Native American
society. It's a
quintessential piece of progressive humbug.
Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of
just about every
prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque: President
Bush did, the
prince of Wales did, the prime minister of the United Kingdom
did, the prime
minister of Canada did . . . The premier of Ontario didn't,
and so 20 Muslim
community leaders had a big summit to denounce him for
failing to visit a
mosque. I don't know why he didn't. Maybe there was a big
backlog, it was
mosque drive time, prime ministers in gridlock up and down
the freeway
trying to get to the Sword of the Infidel-Slayer Mosque on Elm
Street. But
for whatever reason he couldn't fit it into his hectic schedule.
Ontario's
citizenship minister did show up at a mosque, but the imams took
that as a
great insult, like the Queen sending Fergie to open the
Commonwealth Games.
So the premier of Ontario had to hold a big meeting with
the aggrieved imams
to apologize for not going to a mosque and, as the
Toronto Star's reported
it, "to provide them with reassurance that the
provincial government does
not see them as the enemy."
Anyway, the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died down,
but it set the
tone for our general approach to these atrocities. The old
definition of a
nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light changing in
New York and
the first honk from a car behind. The new definition is the gap
between a
terrorist bombing and the press release from an Islamic lobby group
warning
of a backlash against Muslims. In most circumstances, it would be
considered
appallingly bad taste to deflect attention from an actual "hate
crime" by
scaremongering about a purely hypothetical one. Needless to say,
there is no
campaign of Islamophobic hate crimes. If anything, the West is
awash in an
epidemic of self-hate crimes. A commenter on Tim Blair's Web site
in
Australia summed it up in a note-perfect parody of a Guardian
headline:
"Muslim Community Leaders Warn of Backlash from Tomorrow Morning's
Terrorist
Attack." Those community leaders have the measure of us.
Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting
for all along. In
"The Survival of Culture," I quoted the eminent British
barrister Helena
Kennedy, Queen's Counsel. 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.
For example, one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians
returned home, to Lester
B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They
were the son and widow of
a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the
Pakistani-Afghan frontier
was known as "al-Kanadi." Why? Because he was the
highest-ranking Canadian
in al Qaeda--plenty of other Canucks in al Qaeda,
but he was the Numero Uno.
In fact, one could argue that the Khadr family is
Canada's principal
contribution to the war on terror. Granted they're on the
wrong side (if
you'll forgive my being judgmental) but no one can argue that
they aren't in
the thick of things. One of Mr. Khadr's sons was captured in
Afghanistan
after killing a U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured
and held at
Guantanamo. A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian
soldier in
Kabul. Pa Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shootout with
Pakistani forces
in early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren't doing our
bit in this war!
In the course of the fatal shootout of
al-Kanadi, his youngest son was
paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior
didn't fancy a prison hospital in
Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy
returned to Toronto so he could enjoy
the benefits of Ontario government
health care. "I'm Canadian, and I'm not
begging for my rights," declared the
widow Khadr. "I'm demanding my rights."
As they always
say, treason's hard to prove in court, but given the
circumstances of Mr.
Khadr's death it seems clear that not only was he
providing "aid and comfort
to the Queen's enemies" but that he was, in fact,
the Queen's enemy. The
Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, the
Royal 22nd Regiment and
other Canucks have been participating in
Afghanistan, on one side of the
conflict, and the Khadr family had been over
there participating on the other
side. Nonetheless, the prime minister of
Canada thought Boy Khadr's claims on
the public health system was an
excellent opportunity to demonstrate his own
deep personal commitment to
"diversity." Asked about the Khadrs' return to
Toronto, he said, "I believe
that once you are a Canadian citizen, you have
the right to your own views
and to disagree."
That's
the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: You can choose which side
of the
war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just tick
"home team"
or "enemy," according to taste. The Canadian prime minister is a
typical
late-stage Western politician: He could have said, well, these
are
contemptible people and I know many of us are disgusted at the idea of
our
tax dollars being used to provide health care for a man whose
Canadian
citizenship is no more than a flag of convenience, but unfortunately
that's
the law and, while we can try to tighten it, it looks like this
lowlife's
got away with it. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this
as a
wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of the multicultural state.
Like
many enlightened Western leaders, the Canadian prime minister will
be
congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the forces
of
intolerance consume him.
That, by the way, is the
one point of similarity between the jihad and
conventional terrorist
movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups persist
because of a lack of
confidence on the part of their targets: The IRA, for
example, calculated
correctly that the British had the capability to smash
them totally but not
the will. So they knew that while they could never win
militarily, they also
could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured
similarly. The only
difference is that most terrorist wars are highly
localized. We now have the
first truly global terrorist insurgency because
the Islamists view the whole
world the way the IRA view the bogs of
Fermanagh: They want it, and they've
calculated that our entire civilization
lacks the will to see them off.
We spend a lot of time at The New Criterion attacking the
elites, and we're
right to do so. The commanding heights of the culture have
behaved
disgracefully for the last several decades. But if it were just a
problem
with the elites, it wouldn't be that serious: The mob could rise up
and hang
'em from lampposts--a scenario that's not unlikely in certain
Continental
countries. But the problem now goes way beyond the ruling
establishment. The
annexation by government of most of the key
responsibilities of
life--child-raising, taking care of your elderly
parents--has profoundly
changed the relationship between the citizen and the
state. At some point--I
would say socialized health care is a good
marker--you cross a line, and
it's very hard then to persuade a citizenry
enjoying that much government
largesse to cross back. In National Review
recently, I took issue with that
line Gerald Ford always uses to ingratiate
himself with conservative
audiences: "A government big enough to give you
everything you want is big
enough to take away everything you have."
Actually, you run into trouble
long before that point: A government big
enough to give you everything you
want still isn't big enough to get you to
give anything back. That's what
the French and German political classes are
discovering.
Go back to that list of local conflicts I
mentioned. The jihad has held out
a long time against very tough enemies. If
you're not shy about taking on
the Israelis, the Russians, the Indians and
the Nigerians, why wouldn't you
fancy your chances against the Belgians and
Danes and New Zealanders?
So the jihadists are for the
most part doing no more than giving us a prod
in the rear as we sleepwalk to
the cliff. When I say "sleepwalk," it's not
because we're a blasé culture. On
the contrary, one of the clearest signs of
our decline is the way we expend
so much energy worrying about the wrong
things. If you've read Jared
Diamond's bestselling book "Collapse: How
Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed," you'll know it goes into a lot of
detail about Easter Island going
belly up because they chopped down all
their trees. Apparently that's why
they're not a G-8 member or on the U.N.
Security Council. Same with the
Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond's
other curious choices of
"societies." Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty
much every society
collapses because it chops down its trees.
Poor old
Diamond can't see the forest because of his obsession with the
trees.
(Russia's collapsing even as it's undergoing reforestation.) One
way
"societies choose to fail or succeed" is by choosing what to worry
about.
The Western world has delivered more wealth and more comfort to more
of its
citizens than any other civilization in history, and in return
we've
developed a great cult of worrying. You know the classics of the genre:
In
1968, in his bestselling book "The Population Bomb," the eminent
scientist
Paul Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world will
undergo
famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to
death." In
1972, in their landmark study "The Limits to Growth," the Club of
Rome
announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by
1985,
tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and gas
by
1993.
None of these things happened. In fact, quite
the opposite is happening.
We're pretty much awash in resources, but we're
running out of people--the
one truly indispensable resource, without which
none of the others matter.
Russia's the most obvious example: it's the
largest country on earth, it's
full of natural resources, and yet it's
dying--its population is falling
calamitously.
The
default mode of our elites is that anything that happens--from terrorism
to
tsunamis--can be understood only as deriving from the perniciousness
of
Western civilization. As Jean-Francois Revel wrote, "Clearly, a
civilization
that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the
energy and
conviction to defend itself."
And even
though none of the prognostications of the eco-doom blockbusters of
the 1970s
came to pass, all that means is that 30 years on, the end of the
world has to
be rescheduled. The amended estimated time of arrival is now
2032. That's to
say, in 2002, the United Nations Global Environmental
Outlook predicted "the
destruction of 70 percent of the natural world in
thirty years, mass
extinction of species. . . . More than half the world
will be afflicted by
water shortages, with 95 percent of people in the
Middle East with severe
problems . . . 25 percent of all species of mammals
and 10 percent of birds
will be extinct . . ."
Etc., etc., for 450 pages. Or to
cut to the chase, as the Guardian headlined
it, "Unless We Change Our Ways,
The World Faces Disaster."
Well, here's my prediction for 2032: unless
we change our ways the world
faces a future . . . where the environment will
look pretty darn good. If
you're a tree or a rock, you'll be living in
clover. It's the Italians and
the Swedes who'll be facing extinction and the
loss of their natural
habitat.
There will be no environmental
doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide emissions,
deforestation: none of these things
is worth worrying about. What's worrying
is that we spend so much time
worrying about things that aren't worth
worrying about that we don't worry
about the things we should be worrying
about. For 30 years, we've had endless
wake-up calls for things that aren't
worth waking up for. But for the very
real, remorseless shifts in our
society--the ones truly jeopardizing our
future--we're sound asleep. The
world is changing dramatically right now, and
hysterical experts twitter
about a hypothetical decrease in the Antarctic
krill that might conceivably
possibly happen so far down the road there are
unlikely to be any Italian or
Japanese enviro-worriers left alive to be
devastated by it.
In a globalized economy, the
environmentalists want us to worry about First
World capitalism imposing its
ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third
World backwaters. Yet, insofar as
"globalization" is a threat, the real
danger is precisely the opposite--that
the peculiarities of the backwaters
can leap instantly to the First World.
Pigs are valued assets and sleep in
the living room in rural China--and next
thing you know an unknown
respiratory disease is killing people in Toronto,
just because someone got
on a plane. That's the way to look at Islamism: We
fret about McDonald's and
Disney, but the big globalization success story is
the way the Saudis have
taken what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and
unimportant strain of
Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and
successfully exported it
to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester,
Buffalo . . .
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
birthrate 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%, Bulgaria's
by 36%, Estonia's by 52%. 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 16 with the
lowest birthrates; George W. Bush
took 25 of the 26 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 60, 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% 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.
This isn't a deep-rooted cultural difference between the
Old World and the
New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one
wanted to allocate
blame, one could argue that it's a product of the U.S.
military presence,
the American security guarantee that liberated European
budgets: instead of
having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on
butter, and
buttering up the voters. If Washington's problem with Europe is
that these
are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the
years after
the Second World War, created NATO as a postmodern military
alliance? The
"free world," as the Americans called it, was a free ride for
everyone else.
And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of
nationhood,
it's hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to
reshoulder
them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the
Continent
are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term
softening of
large sections of the West makes them ill-suited to resisting a
primal force
like Islam.
There is no "population bomb."
There never was. Birthrates are declining all
over the world--eventually
every couple on the planet may decide to opt for
the Western yuppie model of
one designer baby at the age of 39. But
demographics is a game of last man
standing. The groups that succumb to
demographic apathy last will have a huge
advantage. Even in 1968 Paul
Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that
their so-called population
explosion was really a massive population
adjustment. Of the increase in
global population between 1970 and 2000, the
developed world accounted for
under 9% of it, while the Muslim world
accounted for 26%. Between 1970 and
2000, the developed world declined from
just under 30% of the world's
population to just over 20%, the Muslim nations
increased from about 15% to
20%.
Nineteen seventy
doesn't seem that long ago. If you're the age many of the
chaps running the
Western world today are wont to be, your pants are
narrower than they were
back then and your hair's less groovy, but the
landscape of your life--the
look of your house, the layout of your car, the
shape of your kitchen
appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the
fridge--isn't significantly
different. Aside from the Internet and the cell
phone and the CD, everything
in your world seems pretty much the same but
slightly modified.
And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those
bald statistics:
In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the
global
population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they were the
same:
each had about 20%.
And by 2020?
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 U.K., more Muslims than
Christians attend religious services each week.
Can these
trends continue for another 30 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 M. Chirac,
Herr
Schroeder & 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 Mr. 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. Sometime this century there
will be 500 million
Americans, and what's left in Europe will either be very
old or very Muslim.
Japan faces the same problem: Its population is already
in absolute decline,
the first gentle slope of a death spiral it will be
unlikely ever to climb
out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it's
populated by Koreans
and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it's
populated by Algerians?
That's a trickier proposition.
Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with
Swedish tax rates.
Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa
2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner--and
we're already seeing a drift in that
direction.
In July 2003, speaking to the U.S. Congress,
Tony Blair remarked: "As
Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a
time invincible but, in
fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you
leave behind?"
Excellent question. Britannia will never
again wield the unrivalled power
she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the
Britannic inheritance endures,
to one degree or another, in many of the key
regional players in the world
today--Australia, India, South Africa--and in
dozens of island statelets
from the Caribbean to the Pacific. If China ever
takes its place as an
advanced nation, it will be because the People's
Republic learns more from
British Hong Kong than Hong Kong learns from the
Little Red Book. And of
course the dominant power of our time derives its
political character from
18th-century British subjects who took English ideas
a little further than
the mother country was willing to go.
A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and
end-of-history
triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind?" question is more
urgent than
most of us expected. "The West," as a concept, is dead, and the
West, as a
matter of demographic fact, is dying.
What
will London--or Paris, or Amsterdam--be like in the mid-'30s? If
European
politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the
populace off
their unsustainable 35-hour weeks, retirement at 60, etc., then
to keep the
present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need
to import so
many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will
be well on
its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are
already the
primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a
society become
increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without
becoming
increasingly Islamic in its political character?
This
ought to be the left's issue. I'm a conservative--I'm not entirely on
board
with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so
on, but
I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I'm with Mullah Omar on
that one.
Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay
marriage, are you
so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once
the biggest
demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after
all, are
going to be the first victims of the West's collapsed birthrates?
Even if one
were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to
resist the
creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it
remains the
case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store
by "a
woman's right to choose," in any sense.
I watched that big
abortion rally in Washington in 2004, where Ashley Judd
and Gloria Steinem
were cheered by women waving "Keep your Bush off my bush"
placards, and I
thought it was the equivalent of a White Russian tea party
in 1917. By
prioritizing a "woman's right to choose," Western women are
delivering their
societies into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal
than a 1950s sitcom
dad. If any of those women marching for their
"reproductive rights" still
have babies, they might like to ponder
demographic realities: A little girl
born today will be unlikely, at the age
of 40, to be free to prance around
demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or
Amsterdam chanting "Hands off my bush!"
Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political
analyst Cameron Diaz
appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was
at stake:
"Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right
to our bodies.
. . . If you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote.
But if you
think that you have a right to your body," she advised Oprah's
viewers,
"then you should vote."
Poor Cameron. A couple
of weeks later, the scary people won. She lost all
rights to her body. Unlike
Alec Baldwin, she couldn't even move to France.
Her body was grounded in
Terminal D.
But, after framing the 2004 presidential
election as a referendum on the
right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested
to know that men enjoy that
right under many Islamic legal codes around the
world. In his book "The
Empty Cradle," Philip Longman asks: "So where will
the children of the
future come from? Increasingly they will come from people
who are at odds
with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could
drive human culture
off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist
course, gradually
creating an anti-market culture dominated by
fundamentalism--a new Dark
Ages."
Bottom line for
Cameron Diaz: There are worse things than John Ashcroft out
there.
Mr. Longman's point is well taken. The refined antennae of
Western liberals
mean that whenever one raises the question of whether there
will be any
Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a
generation or
three hence, they cry, "Racism!" To fret about what proportion
of the
population is "white" is grotesque and inappropriate. But it's not
about
race, it's about culture. If 100% of your population believes in
liberal
pluralist democracy, it doesn't matter whether 70% of them are
"white" or
only 5% are. But if one part of your population believes in
liberal
pluralist democracy and the other doesn't, then it becomes a matter
of great
importance whether the part that does is 90% of the population or
only 60%,
50%, 45%.
Since the president unveiled the
so-called Bush Doctrine--the plan to
promote liberty throughout the Arab
world--innumerable "progressives" have
routinely asserted that there's no
evidence Muslims want liberty and,
indeed, that Islam is incompatible with
democracy. If that's true, it's a
problem not for the Middle East today but
for Europe the day after tomorrow.
According to a poll taken in 2004, over
60% of British Muslims want to live
under Shariah--in the United Kingdom. If
a population "at odds with the
modern world" is the fastest-breeding group on
the planet--if there are more
Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims
within those nations, more and
more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and
more and more Muslims
represented in more and more transnational
institutions--how safe a bet is
the survival of the "modern world"?
Not good.
"What do you leave
behind?" asked Tony Blair. There will only be very few
and very old ethnic
Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint of this
century. What will
they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their
names and keep up
some of the old buildings? Or will the dying European
races understand that
the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples
who will live in those
lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal
democracy? It's the
demography, stupid. And, if they can't muster the will
to change course, then
"What do you leave behind?" is the only question that
matters.
Mr. Steyn is a syndicated columnist and theater critic for
The New Criterion
<
https://www.ezsubscription.com/cgi-bin/formgen.exe/add?db=CRITERIO&key=7WWW06>
, in whose January issue this article
appears.