Mark Steyn - America Alone

Across half a century, Continental politics evolved to the point where almost any issue worth talking about was ruled beyond the bounds of polite society. Austria was the classic example: year in, year out, whether you voted for the center-left party or the center-right party, you wound up with the same center-left/center-right coalition presiding over what was in essence a two-party one-party state. In France, M. Chirac isn’t really “center-right” so much as ever so slightly left-of-right-of-left-of center — -and even that distinction only applies when he’s standing next to his former prime minister, the right-of-left-of-right-of-left-of center Lionel Jospin. Though supposedly from opposite ends of the political spectrum, in the 2002 presidential election they wound up running against each other on identical platforms, both passionately committed to high taxes, high unemployment, and high crime. Americans often make the same criticism of their own system — the “Republicrats,” etc. — but the United States still has a more genuinely responsive politics with more ideological diversity than anywhere in Western Europe. On the Continent, the Eurodee and Eurodum mainstream parties are boxed into a consensus politics that’s no longer viable. The people are weary of certain aspects of this postwar settlement — permanent double-digit unemployment and the Islamization of their cities — but they’re not yet ready to give up the social programs, the short work weeks, long vacations, and jobs for life. Europe’s structural problems would require immense cultural change to correct. Is it likely that Europe will muster the will for “painful economic reforms”? It was always a political project masquerading as an economic one, and thus the ruling class’s investment in it is largely emotive and ideological. Hence the Guardian’s attack on the British prime minister for demanding reform of the Common Agricultural Policy:

It is unreasonable of Mr. Blair to repeatedly flourish, as if self-evidently outrageous the simple arithmetic of 40 percent of spending on 4 percent of the European workforce, when rural life is of such social, psychological and aesthetic importance to a vastly larger proportion of the continent’s population.

I think “aesthetic importance” means “we have to drive past a lot of French farms to get to our holiday homes.” Rural life was central to France’s sense of itself. But so was the Catholic Church, and it’s empty now. And so were Catholic-size families, and they’re down to one designer kid. So the character of those quaint villages is utterly changed. Why should the British taxpayer subsidize an ersatz French heritage park about as authentic as Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame? If Pierre’s given up the church and the family, what’s the big deal about giving up the farm?

Ah, well, it won’t be a problem much longer. Under its present economic arrangements, it’s Europe that’s bought the farm.

According to its Office du Tourisme, the big event in Évreux the first weekend of November 2005 was supposed to be the annual féte de la pomme, du cidre et du fromage at the Place de la Mairie. Instead, in this charmingly smoldering cathedral town in Normandy, a shopping mall, a post office, two schools, upwards of fifty vehicles and, oh yes, the police station were destroyed by — what’s that word again? — “youths.” Over at the Place de la Mairie, M. le Maire himself, Jean-Louis Debré, seemed affronted by the very idea that un soupçon de carnage should be allowed to distract from the cheesetasting. “A hundred people have smashed everything and strewn desolation,” he told reporters. “Well, they don’t form part of our universe.” Maybe not, but, unfortunately, you form part of theirs.

M. Debré, a close pal of President Chirac’s, was a little off on the numbers. There were an estimated two hundred “youths” rampaging through Évreux. With baseball bats. They injured, among others, a dozen firemen. “To those responsible for the violence, I want to say: Be serious!” M. Debre told France Info radio. “If you want to live in a fairer, more fraternal society, this is not how to go about it.”

Oh, dear. Who’s not “being serious” here? In Normandy, it’s not just the cheese that’s soft and runny. Granted that France’s over-regulated economy severely obstructs the social mobility of Muslim immigrants, even M. Debris — whoops, sorry — even M. Debré cannot be so out of touch as to think “seriously” that the rioters were rioting for “a fairer, more fraternal society.” But maybe he does. The political class and the media seem to serve as mutual reinforcers of their own obsolete illusions.

In December 2002, I was asked to take part in a symposium on Europe and began with the observation that “I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark.” At the time, this was taken by the Left as confirmation of my descent into insanity: Europe was still regarded as a bastion of progress. By 2006, the Right was querying the thesis, arguing that the Bush Doctrine is a crock: how can liberty save the Muslim world when Muslims are jeopardizing liberty in Europe?

Well, they’re not contradictory positions. In the Middle East, it may well be that, as the gnarled old Yankees tell tourists, you can’t get there from here. But I’d argue there’s a sporting chance of being able to get at least partway there from the here and now of the present Muslim world. Whatever their problems, most Islamic countries will be embarking on their evolution into free states as reasonably homogenous societies. European nations face the trickier job of retaining their freedoms at a time of increasing societal incoherence: they’re getting there from here in the one-way express lane, and they’re not going to like where they end up. About six months after September 11, I went on a grand tour of the Continent’s Muslim ghettos and then flew on to the Middle East. The Muslims I met in Europe were, almost to a man, more alienated and angrier than the ones back in Araby. Don’t take my word for it. It was a Hamburg cell that pulled off September 11, a British subject who was the shoe-bomber, a London School of Economics graduate who had Daniel Pearl executed…

True, America and Australia grew the institutions of their democracy with relatively homogeneous populations and then evolved into successful “multicultural” societies. But the Continent isn’t multicultural so much as bicultural. You have hitherto homogeneous Scandinavian societies whose cities have become 40 percent Muslim in the space of a generation. Imagine colonial New England when it was still the Mayflower crowd and one day they woke up and noticed that all the Aldens and Standishes, Cookes and Winslows were in their fifties and sixties and all the young guys were called Ahmed and Mohammed. That’s what’s happened in Rotterdam and Malmö. There are aging native populations and young Muslim populations and that’s it: “two solitudes,” as they say in my beloved Quebec. If there’s three, four, or more cultures, you can all hold hands and sing “We Are the World.” But if there’s just two — you and the Other — that’s generally more fractious. Bicultural societies are among the least stable in the world, especially once it’s no longer quite clear who’s the majority and who’s the minority — a situation that much of Europe is fast approaching, as you can see by visiting any French, Austrian, Belgian, or Dutch maternity ward. Take Fiji — not a comparison France would be flattered by, although until the late 1980s the Fijians enjoyed a century of peaceful, stable, constitutional evolution the French were never able to manage. At any rate, Fiji is comprised of native Fijians and ethnic Indians brought in as indentured workers by the British. If memory serves, 46.2 percent are native Fijians and 48.6 percent are Indo-Fijians. Fifty-fifty, give or take, with no intermarrying. In 1987, the first Indian-majority government came to power. A month later, Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, officer of the Order of the British Empire, staged the first of his two coups. Is it that difficult to sketch a similar situation for France? Even in relatively peaceful bicultural societies, politics becomes tribal: loyalists vs. nationalists in Northern Ireland, separatists vs. federalists in Quebec. Picture a French election circa 2020: the Islamic Republican Coalition wins the most seats in the National Assembly. The Chiraquiste crowd give a fatalistic shrug and M. de Villepin starts including crowd-pleasing suras from the Koran at his poetry recitals. But would Jean-Marie Le Pen or (by then) his daughter take it so well? Or would the temptation to be France’s Colonel Rabuka prove too much?