- Steyn, Mark.
America Alone.
Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2006.
ISBN 0-89526-078-6.
-
Leave it to
Mark Steyn to write a funny book about the
collapse of Western civilisation. Demographics are destiny, and
unlike political and economic trends, are easier to extrapolate
because the parents of the next generation have already been born: if
there are more of them than their own parents, a population is almost
certain to increase, and if there are fewer, the population is
destined to fall. Once fertility drops to 1.3 children per woman or
fewer, a society enters a demographic “death spiral” from
which there is no historical precedent for
recovery. Italy, Spain, and Russia are already below this level,
and the European Union as a whole is at 1.47, far below the
replacement rate of 2.1. And what's the makeup of this shrinking
population of Europe? Well, we might begin by asking what is the most
popular name for boys born in Belgium…and Amsterdam…and
Malmö, Sweden: Mohammed. Where is this going? Well, in the
words
of Mullah Krekar of Norway (p. 39), “We're the ones who
will change you. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an
average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is
producing 3.5 children. By 2050, 30 percent of the population in
Europe will be Muslim. Our way of thinking…will prove more
powerful than yours.”
The author believes, and states forthrightly, that it is the purest
fantasy to imagine that this demographic evolution, seen by many of
the élite as the only hope of salvation for the European
welfare state, can occur without a profound change in the very nature
of the societies in which it occurs. The end-point may not be
“Eutopia”, but rather “Eurabia”, and the
timidity of European nations who already have an urban Muslim
population approaching 30% shows how a society which has lost
confidence in its own civilisation and traditions and imbibed the
feel-good but ultimately debilitating doctrine of multiculturalism ends up
assimilating to the culture of the immigrants, not the other way
around. Steyn sees only three possible outcomes for the West
(p. 204):
- Submit to Islam
- Destroy Islam
- Reform Islam
If option one is inconceivable and option two unthinkable
(and probably impossible, certainly without changing Western
civilisation beyond recognition and for the worse), you're
left with number three, but, as Steyn notes, “Ultimately,
only Muslims can reform Islam”. Unfortunately, the
recent emergence of a global fundamentalist Islamic identity
with explicitly political goals may be the
Islamic Reformation, and if that be the case, the trend is
going in the wrong direction. So maybe option one isn't off
the table, after all.
The author traces the roots of the European predicament to the
social democratic welfare state, which like all collectivist schemes,
eventually creates a society of perpetual adolescents who never mature
into and assume the responsibilities of adults. When the
state becomes responsible for all the things the family once had
to provide for, and is supported by historically unprecedented
levels of taxation which impoverish young families and make
children unaffordable, why not live for the present and
let the next generation, wherever it may come from, worry about
itself? In a static situation, this is a prescription for
the kind of societal decline which can be seen in the histories
of both Greece and Rome, but when there is a self-confident,
rapidly-proliferating immigrant population with no inclination
to assimilate, it amounts to handing the keys over to the new
tenants in a matter of decades.
Among Western countries, the United States is the great outlier,
with fertility just at the replacement rate and
immigrants primarily of Hispanic origin who have, historically,
assimilated to U.S. society in a generation or two. (There
are reasons for concern about the present rate of immigration
to the U.S. and the impact of multiculturalism on assimilation
there, but that is not the topic of this book.) Steyn envisages
a future, perhaps by 2050, where the U.S. looks out upon the
world and sees not an
“end of history”
with liberal democracy and free markets triumphant around the
globe but rather (p. 205), “a totalitarian
China, a crumbling Russia, an insane Middle East, a disease-ridden
Africa, [and] a civil war-torn Eurabia”—America alone.
Heavy stuff, but Steyn's way with words will keep you chuckling
as you contemplate the apocalypse. The book is long on worries
and short on plausible solutions, other than a list of palliatives
which it is unlikely Western societies, even the U.S., have the
will to adopt, although the author predicts (p. 192)
“By 2015, almost every viable political party in the West
will be natalist…”. But demographics don't turn
on a dime, and by then, whatever measures are politically
feasible may be too little to make much difference.
November 2006 