Authors: Mark Steyn
Page 77
where it hovers permanently at around 10 percent. As for being "the stumbling block in international environmental cooperation," European countries signed Kyoto and failed to meet its emission reduction targets, whereas the United States didn't sign it but reduced its emissions anyway--through that traditional American virtue of innovation. Self-loathing Americans are in danger of sounding like self-loathing squares if they pin their hopes on a decayed Eutopia a quarter century past its sell-by date.
Two forces are facing off on the European continent: on the one side, the modern social-democratic state that the American Left thinks should be our model; on the other, the resurgent Islam that the American Left insists is just a scam cooked up by Karl Rove. We now have an excellent opportunity to test both propositions. How bad is it going to get in Europe? As bad as it can get--as in societal collapse, fascist revivalism, and then the long Eurabian night, not over the entire Continent but over significant parts of it. And those countries that manage to escape the darkness will do so only after violent convulsions of their own.
You could avoid some of the bloodshed if European leaders were more responsive. Instead, they've spent so long peddling Eutopian illusions most of the political class is determined to stick with them come what may. The construction of a pan-continental Eutopia was meant to ensure that Europe would never again succumb to militant nationalism of one form or another. Instead, the European Union's governing class has become as obnoxiously post-nationalist as it was once nationalist: its post-nationalism has become merely the latest and most militant form of militant nationalism--which, aside from anything else, makes America, as the leading "nation state" in the traditional sense, the prime target of European ire.
It's true that there are many European populations reluctant to go happily into the long Eurabian night. But, alas for them, modern Europe is constructed so as to insulate almost entirely the political class from populist pressures. As the computer types say, that's not a bug, it's a feature: the European Union is a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem, and one of the problems it was designed to solve is that fellows like Hitler and Mussolini were way too popular with the masses. Just as the House of Saud, Mubarak, and the other Arab autocracies sell themselves to the West as necessary brakes on the baser urges of their peoples, so the European leadership deludes itself on the same basis: why, without the EU, we'd be back to Auschwitz. Thus, on the eve of the 2005 referendum on the European
"constitution," the Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, warned his people where things would be headed if they were reactionary enough to vote no. "I've been in Auschwitz and Yad Vashem," he said. "The images haunt me every day. It is supremely important for us to avoid such things in Europe."
Golly. So the choice for voters on the Euro-ballot was apparently: yes to the European Constitution or yes to a new Holocaust. If there was a neither-of-the-above box, the EU's rulers were keeping quiet about it. The notion that the Continent's peoples are basically a bunch of genocidal wackos champing at the bit for a new bloodbath is one I'm not unsympathetic to. But it's a curious rationale to pitch to one's electorate: vote for us; we're the straitjacket on your own worst instincts. In the end, the French and Dutch electorates voted no to the new constitution. One recalls the T-shirt slogan popular among American feminists: "What part of 'No' don't you understand?" In the chancelleries of Europe, pretty much every part. At the time of the constitution referenda, the rotating European
"presidency" was held by Luxembourg, a country slightly larger than your rec room. JeanClaude Juncker, its rhetorically deranged prime minister and European "president," staggered
America Alone
Page 78
around like a collegiate date-rape defendant, insisting that all reasonable persons understand that "Non" really means "Oui." As he put it before the big vote: "If it's a yes, we will say 'on we go,' and if it's a no we will say 'we continue.' "
And if it's a neither of the above, he will say "we move forward." You get the idea. Confronted by the voice of the people, "President" Juncker covers his ears and says, "Nya, nya, nya, can't hear you!"
Only in totalitarian dictatorships does the ballot come with a preordained correct answer. Yet "President" Juncker distilled the great flaw at the heart of the EU constitution into one disarmingly straightforward expression of contempt for the will of the people. For his part, the architect of the constitution--the former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing--was happy to pile on: why, even if the French and Dutch had been boorish enough to want to vote no to the constitution, they would have been incapable of so doing, as the whole thing was designed to be way above their pretty little heads. "It is not possible for anyone to understand the full text," declared M. Giscard. During his labors on the constitution, he'd told me he saw himself as "Europe's Jefferson." By referendum night he'd apparently become Europe's Jefferson Airplane, boasting about the impenetrability of his hallucinogenic lyrics. The point is that his ingrate subjects had no need to read beyond the opening sentence: "We the people agree to leave it to you the people who know better than the people."
After that, the rest doesn't matter: you can't do trickle-down nation-building. That's another feature of the paternalistic welfare state--that the paternalists, the rulers, come to regard the electorate as children, to be seen but not heard. Hence Europe's ever-widening gulf between a remote disconnected political establishment and a population with a growing list of concerns its leaders refuse to discuss. To carry on supporting the Euroconsensus of the Junckers and Giscards is not so much a vote to commit suicide but a vote to take as many people over the ledge with you as possible.
The transatlantic "split" has nothing to do with disagreements over Iraq, and can't be repaired by a more Europhile president in Washington: you can't "mend bridges" when the opposite bank is sinking into the river. If Americans think that the post-bombing 2004
Spanish election result was a disgrace, look down the road to the next election cycle, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and beyond. In the United States, psephologists speculate on the impact of Ralph Nader's 2 or 3 percent in swing states. Think about an election in which 20 percent of the voters are a self-segregating Muslim bloc. If Washington had a hard time getting any useful contribution to the war from Europe in 2001 or 2003, you do the math ten or fifteen years hence.
If there is a ten or fifteen years hence. The U.S. government's National Intelligence Council is predicting the EU will collapse by 2020. I think that's rather a cautious estimate myself. Ever since September 11, I've been gloomily predicting that the European powder keg's about to go up, and that within the next couple of election cycles the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way. If you were one of those
"redneck Christian fundamentalists" the world's media are always warning about apropos America, you might think the Continent's in for what looks awfully like the Four Horsemen of the Eupocalypse--although in tribute to Euro-perversity they're showing up in reverse order: Death--the demise of European races too self-absorbed to breed; Famine--the end of the lavishly funded statist good times; War--the decline into bloody civil unrest that these economic and demographic factors will bring; and Conquest--the re-colonization of Europe by Islam.
America Alone
Page 79
Happily, most Europeans are far too "rational" and "enlightened" and "post-Christian" to believe in such outmoded notions as apocalyptic equestrians. Nonetheless, in some still barely articulated way, many of them understand that their continent is dying, and it's only a question of whether it goes peacefully or through convulsions of violence. On that point, I bet on form.
DEATH
There are many agreeable aspects of old Europe--old buildings, good food, foxy-looking women who dress to show themselves off. Compared to a strip mall in Jersey, the Continent is "sophisticated." But it's sophisticated in the sense that a belle époque Parisian boulevardier is sophisticated--outwardly dapper and worldly, inwardly eaten away by syphilis and gonorrhea. It's only a question of how many others the clapped-out bon vivant infects before his final collapse. The seventeen nations that have slipped below the "lowest-low" fertility rate of 1.3 and remained there are embarking on a historically unprecedented exercise in self-extinction. I certainly hope some countries can summon the will to change: I don't believe the Poles and Hungarians saw off the Soviets only to be consumed by a disaster from the Western end of the Continent a generation later. But the logic of the European Union is to ensnare the least decayed polities in the problems of the Euro-core-the Germans and the French--and the latter's problems are not something anybody else should willingly yoke himself to.
By 2050, there will be 100 million more Americans, 100 million fewer Europeans. In 1970, there were 4.6 million Italians under five years old. By 2004, there were 2.6 million. And the fewer babies you have today, the fewer grown-ups are around to have babies in twenty years. What do you figure the 2020 numbers will look like? If you think that a nation is no more than a "great hotel" (as Canadian novelist Yann Martel approvingly described his own, country), you can always slash rates and fill the empty rooms--for as long as there are any would-be lodgers left out there to move in. But if you believe a nation is the collective, accumulated wisdom of a shared past, then a dependence on immigration alone for population replenishment will leave you lost and diminished.
Americans take for granted all the "it's about the future of our children" hooey that would ring so hollow in a European election. In the 2005 German campaign, voters were offered what would be regarded in the United States as a statistically improbable choice: a childless man (Herr Schroder) vs. a childless woman (Frau Merkel). Statist Europe signed on to Hillary Rodham Clinton's alleged African proverb--"It takes a village to raise a child"-only to discover they got it backward: on the Continent, the lack of children will raze the village. And most of the villagers still refuse to recognize the contradictions: you can't breed at the lethargic rate of most Europeans and then bitch and whine about letting the Turks into the European Union. Demographically, they're the kids you couldn't be bothered to have.
One would assume a demographic disaster is the sort of thing that sneaks up on you because you're having a grand old time: you stayed in university till you were thirty-eight, you took early retirement at forty-five, you had two months a year on the Cote d'Azur, you drank wine, you ate foie gras and truffles, you marched in the street for a twenty-eight-hour work week .... It was all such great fun there was no time to have children. You thought the couple in the next street would, or the next town, or in all those bucolic villages you pass through on the way to your weekend home.
America Alone
Page 80
But the strange thing is that Europeans aren't happy. The Germans are so slumped in despond that in 2005 the government began running a Teutonic feel-good marketing campaign in which old people are posed against pastoral vistas, fetching gays mooch around the Holocaust memorial, Katarina Witt stands in front of some photogenic moppets, etc., and then they all point their fingers at the camera and shout" Du bist Deutschland!"--"You are Germany!"--which is meant somehow to pep up glum Hun couch potatoes. Can't see it working myself. The European Union got rid of all the supposed obstacles to happiness-war, politics, the burden of work, insufficient leisure time, tiresome dependents and yet their people are strikingly gloomy. They especially got rid of that oppressive Christianity. In the words of the official slogan of John Lennon International Airport at Liverpool: "Above us only sky." In Europe, they embraced the sappy nihilism of "Imagine" wholeheartedly:
• "Imagine there's no heaven." No problem. Large majorities of Scandinavians and Dutchmen and Belgians are among the first peoples in human history to be unable to imagine there's any possibility of heaven: no free people have ever been so voluntarily secular.
• "Imagine all the people/Living for today." Check.
• "Imagine there's no countries." Check. The EU is a post-nationalist pseudostate.
• "Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion, too." You got it. And yet somehow "all the people/Living life in peace" doesn't seem to be working out. You can't help noticing that since abandoning its faith in the unseen world Europe seems also to have lost faith in the seen one. Consider this poll taken in 2002 for the first anniversary of September 11: 61 percent of Americans said they were optimistic about the future, as opposed to 43 percent of Canadians, 42 percent of Britons, 29 percent of the French, 23 percent of Russians, and 15 percent of Germans. I wouldn't reckon those numbers will get any cheerier over the years.
What's the most laughable article published in a major American newspaper in the last decade? A strong contender would be a column published in the New York Times in July 2005 by the august Princeton economist Paul Krugman. The headline is "French Family Values," and the thesis is that, while parochial American conservatives drone on about
"family values," the Europeans live it, enacting policies that are more "family friendly." On the Continent, claims Professor Krugman, "government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff--to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family."
How can an economist make that claim without noticing that the upshot of all these
"family friendly" policies is that nobody has any families? Isn't the first test of a pro-family regime its impact on families?
As for all that extra time, what happened? Europeans work fewer hours than Americans, they don't have to pay for their own health care, they don't go to church and they don't contribute to other civic groups, they don't marry and they don't have kids to take to school and basketball and the 4-H stand at the county fair.