[Clive]
If there’s one thing that has driven me mad about American conservatism lately, it’s the spate of columns and books banging on about the imminent "end of Europe". Show me the the phrase "death spiral" one more time, and I’ll tear up all my back issues of National Review. All right, the continent faces its share of problems, demographic and otherwise, and there’s enough dumb anti-Americanism washing around to keep Michael Moore supplied with hamburgers for many lifetimes. But let’s have a little more nuance, please, and less of this kind of talk radio hype:
In brief: Europeans are lazy, unwilling to fight for anything and willing to surrender to anyone; they are fascinated by decadence; they favour the bureaucracy over the corporation; they are unable to assimilate their immigrants; they no longer have children; they no longer produce much of cultural or scientific significance; they have lost their religious vocation and they no longer hold their lives to be meaningful.
Behind the shrill tone, I sometimes sense a desperate urge to forget some of the difficulties America faces at home and in certain corners of the globe. (Is unchecked Mexican immigration a glowing example of multiethnic politics?) I haven’t yet got a copy of Mark Steyn’s bestseller, "America Alone", but veteran German journalist Josef Joffe – a Fellow at the Hoover Institution – offers some perspective in the New York Sun:
He has got punch, wit, and smarts, and if he were teaching in a North American humanities department, they would send him off to "sensitivity training" for life, without parole….This book is a relentlessly funny and felicitous polemic, but as in any polemic, its sparkling insights don’t quite add up to a watertight brief. Sentences are honed to the sharpest, wittiest point, but, in the end, they leave you breathless and with a sense of de trop. You begin to scratch your head once your look past the sheer delight of reading.
Above all, Joffe doesn’t buy the "Eurabia" thesis, which has become common currency in certain parts of the Right:
There are only 20 million self-righteous and embittered Muslims in Europe — and 430 million soi-disant Euro-weenies. It will take a while before the former overwhelm the latter — a couple of hundred years at least. Meanwhile, these secular and Christian folks are not amoebae or lemmings, driven to their demise by forces they neither understand nor control. If September 11, 2001, was no wake-up call, July 7, 2005, in Britain was, and so were the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam and a spate of foiled terror attacks since then.
Those Euros are beginning to see multiculturalism as an unforeseen passport to "parallel universes" in their inner and outer cities; they are taking a hard look at their mosques, and what is taught in them; and they are tightening up on immigration. The new buzzword is "integration," which is a more correct moniker for "assimilation." Nor is America as exceptional as Mr. Steyn would have us believe. Berkeley is more like Berlin than Boise when it comes to the siren call of multiculturalism and "Otherism."
None of this is to say the dangers are imaginary. History hasn’t ended. But some of the Cassandras have a habit of sounding as crudely deterministic as any old school Marxist.
The Dish 