Mark Steyn - America Alone

In 2005, responding to Islamist terrorism in Britain and elsewhere, Germany was reported to be considering the introduction of a Muslim public holiday. As Mathias Dopfner, chief executive of the media group Axel Springer, put it: “A substantial fraction of Germany’s government — and, if polls are to be believed, the German people — believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of fanatical Islamists.”

Great. At least the appeasers of the 1930s did it on their own time. But, in recasting appeasement as yet another paid day off, the new proposal cunningly manages to combine the worst instincts of the old Europe and the new. If you want the state of the Continent in a nutshell, consider this news item from the south of France, 2005: A fellow in Marseilles was charged with fraud because he lived with the dead body of his mother for five years in order to continue receiving her pension of 700 euros a month. She was ninety-four when, she croaked, so she’d presumably been enjoying the old government check for a good three decades or so, but her son figured he might as well keep the money rolling in until her second century and, with her corpse tucked away under a pile of rubbish in the living room, the female telephone voice he put on for the benefit of the social services office was apparently convincing enough. As the Reuters headline put it: “Frenchman Lived with Dead Mother to Keep Pension.”

That’s the perfect summation of Europe: welfare addiction over demographic reality. Think of the European Union as that flat in Marseilles, and the Eutopian political consensus as the stiff, and lavish government largesse as that French guy’s dead mom’s benefits. Take the one-time economic powerhouse of the Continent — Germany — and pick any of the usual indicators of a healthy advanced industrial democracy: Unemployment? The highest since the 1930s. House prices? Down. New car registration? Nearly 15 percent lower in 2005 than in 1999. General nuttiness? A third of Germans under thirty think the United States government was responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11. While the unemployment, real estate, and car sales may be reversible, that last number suggests the German electorate isn’t necessarily the group you’d want to pitch a rational argument to, especially about the urgent need either to give up the unsustainable welfare state or to produce a population capable of sustaining it — whether by immigration, transhuman science, or the old-fashioned method of a box of chocolates, the lights down low, and Johnny Mathis on the hi-fi. Here’s another statistic: 30 percent of German women are now childless. Among German university graduates, it’s over 40 percent. Yet according to polls taken before the inconclusive 2005 German elections, 70 percent of people want no further cuts in the welfare state and prefer increasing taxation on the very rich (whoever he is), and only 45 percent of Germans agreed that competition is good for economic growth and employment. It seems things are going to have to get a lot worse before European voters will seriously consider “necessary reforms” and “painful changes.” And the longer European countries postpone the “painful” reforms, the more painful they’re going to be.

Almost every issue facing the European Union — from immigration rates to crippling state pension liabilities — has at its heart the same root cause: a huge lack of babies. Every day you get ever more poignant glimpses of the Euro-future, such as it is. One can talk airily about being flushed down the toilet of history, but even that’s easier said than done. In eastern Germany, rural communities are dying, and one consequence is that village sewer systems are having a tough time adjusting to the lack of use. Populations have fallen so dramatically that there are too few people flushing to keep the flow of waste moving. Traditionally, government infrastructure expenditure arises from increased demand. In this case, the sewer lines are having to be narrowed at great cost in order to cope with dramatically decreased demand.

There’s no precedent for managed decline in societies as advanced as Europe’s, but the early indications are that it’s going to be expensive. One notes again that the environmentalists got it exactly backward: it’s not a question of “sustainable growth” but of sustainable lack of growth. And no advanced society has attempted that experiment till now. For purposes of comparison, by 2050 public pensions expenditures are expected to be 6.5 percent of GDP in the United States, 16.9 percent in Germany, 17.3 percent in Spain, and 24.8 percent in Greece. In Europe, we’re talking not about the prospect of having to reduce benefits but about so long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, adieu, adieu, adieu to yieu and yieu and yieu. American reformers like to say that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. The EU has a vastly greater problem: the entire modern European edifice is a Ponzi scheme. And the political establishments in Paris, Berlin, Brussels, et al. show no sign of producing leaders willing to confront it.

Germany has a shrinking economy, a shrinking and aging population, and potentially catastrophic welfare liabilities. Yet 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 would suggest closing the gap. The Dutch and the Norwegians are even bigger slackers.

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. It’s a product of the U.S. military presence, a security guarantee that liberated European budgets; instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. But even with reduced defense expenditure, the European welfare state depends on economic growth and population growth. The former is now barely detectable and the latter is already in reverse. After the rejection of the European Constitution, Jacques Chirac reacted to his impertinent electorate’s appalling lése-majesté by appointing as French prime minister a man who was the very embodiment of the ruling elite’s serene insulation from popular opinion-Dominique de Villepin, the magnificently obstructionist big-haired foreign minister in the run-up to the Iraq war. Aside from his Byronic locks, M. de Villepin also writes sub-sub-sub-Byronic doggerel. Whenever he turns up on CNN, starry-eyed Democrat viewers send cooing e-mails to Wolf Blitzer and Jack Cafferty, wondering why their own vulgar republic can’t produce a political leader who speaks English with such suave erudition — a veritable Rimbaud to Bush’s Rambo. So, in his first big speech in the gig, Monsieur Sophisticate was at pains to reassure French voters that the internal tensions of a pampered lethargic overregulated welfare society could all be resolved through “Gallic genius”: “In a modern democracy, the debate is not between the liberal and the social, it is between immobilism and action. Solidarity and initiative, protection and daring: that is the French genius.” Ooh-Ia-Ia! C’est magnifique! C’est formidable, n’est-ce pas? All those elegant nouns just waiting for a stylishly coiffed French genius to steer the appropriate course between the Scylla of solidarity and the Charybdis of initiative, between protection and daring, immobilism and action, inertia and panic, stylish insouciance and meaningless gestures, abstract nouns and street riots, etc, etc. The French electorate has relatively down-to-earth concerns: crime, jobs, immigration. But for a man of letters that’s all too dreary and prosaic compared with an open-ended debate between solidarity and initiative stretching lazily into the future.